The Difficult (but Critical) Task of Defining Your Skills When Searching for a Job

If there was only one reason to read my new book RELAUNCH! Stagnation, Change, and Renewal in Mid-Career and Beyond, chapter 8 on Identifying Job Skills might be it. Accurately assessing and articulating your own skills can be incredibly difficult, but critical.

Why is it so difficult? First, skills are easily confused with tasks you do or talents or aptitudes you have. So it's important to understand how to differentiate out true skills. Second, it's important to be able to inventory not only the skills you use now, but also skills you've developed in the past that still apply today. These are your "hidden" skills, because they're not in your immediate memory. You have to dig deep to remember them. Third, you must be able to clearly articulate your skills in writing, as skills and not something else.

Almost everyone has difficulty doing these things, even career counselors, vocational experts, and human resource professionals. After studying skills concepts, analyzing skills in thousands of cases, and working with my own clients in helping them articulate skills, several years ago I wrote a self-help blog article on how to assess and write skills. The purpose was mainly for use with clients in my career consulting practice. The task was so elusive that even after several article revisions clients using it still needed guidance to repeatedly revise their lists. Based on these experiences, the final revision is now Chapter 8 in  RELAUNCH! and it's prime-time ready. You should now be able to use the guidance in that chapter to do it yourself!

Why is assessing and writing your job skills so critical? When you do it right, the list of skills that surfaces pleasantly surprises most people. Clients sometimes say they never knew how many skills they really have. So, it's an eye opener and confidence builder. Also, an exhaustive written list is useful when you construct different resumes for job applications. You can revise your resume to include only skills relevant to the job in question. That keeps your resume shorter and increases your chances for an interview. Such a list can also help you see new options for transferring skills to a new line of work. Finally, when you retain a written list, including hidden skills, it serves as a memory aide in preparation for job interviews. Review it before the interview. Then, if questions come up  about skills or if you see an opportunity to interject something about a hidden skill, you'll be ready!

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