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It’s important for everyone to re-evaluate their work skills from time to time. This allows you to track your professional growth, understand what job opportunities you have in the labor market, and what you need to work on to increase them. Additionally, reviewing what you can do helps you write an excellent resume if you are looking for a new job. Here’s how to analyze your skills.
Types of Skills
Work skills can be divided into two large groups: professional knowledge, or hard skills, and universal abilities, or soft skills. The former includes everything that can be learned in a university, on courses, or on the job. For example, knowledge of foreign languages and programming languages.
The second group includes personal qualities that help in work: creativity, critical thinking, teamwork and leadership skills, negotiation and public speaking skills, the ability to act in stressful situations and others. These skills can also be learned, but it is more difficult.
Both types are needed for a successful career, and many recruiters believe that soft skills are more important. Two candidates for a job may have roughly the same level of education and experience, then the ability to present oneself and favorably talk about one’s experience becomes an important advantage.
Competencies change over time: each new project or task teaches us something new. That’s why it’s important to regularly review your skills—about once a year, even if you’re not job hunting. If you’ve decided to quit or change your profession, you need not only to formally update your resume but also try to understand what you’re capable of and what you’d like to do. To do this, it’s worth taking a closer look at your skills, both well-developed and hidden. Here’s what you can do.
ADVICE 1 – Ask others to evaluate you
People find it difficult to evaluate themselves. Fears, desires, psychological traits, and unconscious motivations distort self-perception. One of the most famous studies on this topic was conducted by Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, Simin Vazir, in the 2000s.
She asked a group of students to evaluate their intellectual level. Then she compared these data with the results of IQ tests. It turned out that they were almost not correlated with each other. But self-assessment, as psychological tests showed, directly influenced the students’ views of their own intelligence. Those who were generally confident in themselves were not in doubt that they were smarter than others, even if their academic achievements were not impressive. The insecure considered themselves foolish, even if they got good grades.
Further research by Vazir showed that others such as friends, colleagues, partners, and even strangers, typically evaluate our intellectual and creative abilities, strengths, and weaknesses much more objectively. It’s worth using this when re-evaluating your own skills.
A simple way is to simply ask different people about what they think of your professional skills.
A complex way is to create a detailed questionnaire. You can base it on the “360 degrees” method. HR specialists often use it to assess employees’ competencies.
Ideally, the questionnaire should consist of several tens of questions covering all the skills you use in your work. For example:
- “Am I doing well with my responsibilities? What am I lacking?”
- “How do I make decisions: do I listen to others or rely on my own experience?”
- “Am I communicating well with my colleagues, supervisors, and clients?”
- “Should I be more assertive at work or, conversely, slow down a bit?”
Ask your colleagues and clients to take your survey. Not everyone may agree—try to choose those who are willing to help and explain to them why it is important for your professional development. And lastly, be prepared for criticism.
ADVICE 2 – Write your biography
How we evaluate different events depends not only on what we remember about them, but also on how we tell the stories to ourselves and others. This way – through stories – we organize our experience. This perspective is based on a special method in psychotherapy – narrative practices. They are most often used to treat the consequences of traumatic events, but are also useful in many other cases. Including using them to understand the reasons for your professional successes and failures, extract important lessons from them and change your attitude towards them.
One way to do this is to write your professional and personal biography. This method is used in business schools to help students understand themselves, recognize their strengths and weaknesses, and understand their goals.
The rules for writing a biography are, at first glance, simple. It is necessary to tell in maximum detail, with specific examples and in chronological order:
- About why and how you chose your profession.
- About who influenced you in a professional sense.
- About all the difficulties and challenges that happened to you at work and how you coped with them.
- About what you like to do and what you don’t like. What you do well and what you don’t do so well.
- In the end, formulate where you are going, that is, what you would like to achieve in a professional and career sense.
This work will probably take several hours or even days. But don’t try to fit into a shorter time frame: the process is the most important thing in narrative practices. By remembering and describing your experience in detail, we force the brain to restructure and analyze it again. You will undoubtedly notice that the same events in a biography can be told differently – and this allows you to look at yourself, your skills and abilities in a new way.
Remember that biography is an unfinished work. From time to time, it’s worth revisiting, re-reading, and maybe even re-writing, if you realize that your perception of yourself and what happened in the past has changed.
ADVICE 3 – Visualize growth
To do this, remember everything you’ve learned at work recently. To make it easier, try the PARLA method. It’s used by HR specialists during hiring or an annual employee appraisal. But you can also use it on your own.
First, make a list of work projects that you recently participated in. Then, for each one, create a table on a separate sheet of paper with five columns. The first column is “Problem,” in which you describe the main task that you were solving while working on the project. The second column is “Action,” in which you list the actions you took to solve the task. Sum up what you achieved and record it in the third column, “Result.” The skills and knowledge you acquired during the task resolution should be entered in the fourth column, “Experience.” And those that you will use in practice should be entered in the “Application” column.
Such tables will become a visual representation of your experience and will help you formulate and analyze it. They will also be useful when updating your resume. Recruiters recommend adding not an abstract description of responsibilities at your current job, but a brief account of results with specific figures.
Advice 4 – Don’t rely on formal achievements
Big experience, high position, solid salary, and even expert status are not always indicators of a good worker. Expertise can not prevent belief in fake information, and confidence in one’s own experience frequently does not allow for doubt in one’s judgments and views, leading to inefficiency and errors.
One study, which tested more than 3000 managers, showed that people with more experience were less accurate in assessing their own effectiveness than those with less experience.
Power also blinds people. Another study involving several thousand managers found that the higher a person’s position, the more they tend to overestimate their skills and abilities. Scientists believe that the fact that there are few people around senior leaders who are capable of giving them constructive feedback and those who are don’t do so out of fear of losing their job, only exacerbates the situation.
Therefore, if you want to fairly and accurately assess your skills and abilities, don’t forget to check with your colleagues, ideally from different workplaces. And start valuing not only external manifestations of success, but also your internal, unseen victories. How you overcame the fear of public speaking and gave an excellent presentation. How you learned to say “no” in response to requests to do someone else’s work. How you solved a problem that you were most afraid of.
ADVICE 5 – Conduct a field research
To understand what skills are in demand, how competitive you are, and if you have a chance to change your field of activity, study job postings on job search websites. Pay attention not only to vacancies that correspond to your current position and profession, but also to those that indicate a higher position that you would like to occupy or a new field of activity that interests you.
Look at the requirements for applicants listed in them. Write down the ones that employers call mandatory or desirable. Consider how well you meet these criteria, can you add the necessary skills to your resume immediately, or do you need to work on them. If during the process you feel that you have nothing to offer the labor market – do not despair, but think about how to develop the necessary skills to get your dream job. Career growth can be extremely unexpected.
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