Identifying Your Skills

Once you have determined your work values and thought about where your job interests lie, you need to progress further and think about your skills, knowledge and experience. In considering this, it is essential not just to think about what you do in your current work, but also to incorporate what you have done in previous jobs and outside of paid work.

Assessing your Skills

In order to assess your skills, put yourself in the role of an employer - what information would you need to assure yourself that a candidate was capable of doing a job?

• Evidence of previous work - this would help determine whether the candidate was likely to have the skills, knowledge and experience required for the job.
• Educational qualifications - this would give a broad indication of overall level of their ability and show whether they had the specific skills and knowledge required for certain types of work.
• Key skills, such as IT skills or communication skills.

The importance given to each of these elements will vary significantly for different kinds of jobs. Whilst qualifications are important for technical and professional occupations, they may be less important for non-technical and managerial jobs, where experience and skills are the key indicators of suitability. More importance will be attached to recent work history than to qualifications that were gained many years ago.

Use these same principles when you are establishing whether you are qualified to do any type of job. You have to review your skills, knowledge and experience, as well as your educational qualifications, to determine what sort of jobs you may be capable of doing.