If  you want to change your career or if your job is under threat due to restructuring or potential redundancy you have an opportunity to take stock of your life. Even if you are in a forced situation you can still make a positive move towards the future you want.   A good place to start is by look at what skills you have to offer, not just the skills you use at work, but also hobbies and outside activities. A skills audit is really a “brainstorm” of your strengths.

Time to Reflect: What skills have you got that you haven’t had the opportunity to use for a while?

 

So what areas are useful to look at?

You can assess one or more or even all of the following areas – all will help create some clarity about the positive aspects about you and your skills.

Your Values

This identifies what is important to you. Your future satisfaction and motivation depends on how you can satisfy your values.

Your Life Dreams/ Career Dreams

What do you want out of life? Where do you see yourself in 20 years time?  Although this may seem a little out of reach right now, thinking about where you ultimately want to be may actually help you to decide what you should do in the short term.

If you know this then you can start working towards it. What career aspirations do you have? Will your career aspirations help you achieve your life aspirations? Now may be a good time to consider a change in direction in your career or for you to revitalise your current career – another company will only add to your experience for the future.

Your Key Achievements

It is a good idea to try to list your key achievements to date, looking at your current and past roles. What have you achieved in your job. What are you proud of?

Your “Know-how” / experience

What aspects of your past jobs and current jobs do you think other employers might be interested in. This could include functional experience such as customer services, particular systems used in the organisation, specific industry experience such as Leisure Industry, particular products and services of the organisation.

Your Strengths

This will help you to be positive about you. We are out own worst enemies sometimes and often are highly critical of ourselves. By looking at strengths just counteracts the negativity we sometimes deal ourselves particularly when we are experiencing difficult times.

Your Transferable Skills

Transferable Skills are those skills which can be used in a different job, a different company, and often a different industry. It includes skills such as communication, team working, service focus, decision making, planning and organising, leadership etc.  Sometimes in our roles at work we only use a small amount of our skills bag. Often it is outside work that we utilise our full skills base. Our hobbies and interests often mean we have transferable skills.

 Your Development Areas

It is also useful to consider what skills you needed to develop in your current role and also to develop into your future role. Sometimes you can start developing these areas quite easily for instance just by spending time reading books on the subject will make you more aware and will certainly be useful to talk about at an interview.

If you need help to do a “skills audit” coaching can really help….

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