What skills do you have?
We all have many skills. It is important to identify the skills you have and what areas you may wish to address with further training.
In developing your career, it helps to be able to name your skills and give an example of how or where you used them. For example women returning to the paid workforce after years of caring for a home and family often have a broad range of competencies that are very relevant to a workplace environment.
Skills generally fall into three categories:
Transferable skills
A transferable skill is one that can be used in a variety of situations or jobs, such as problem-solving, clear written and oral communication and leadership skills.
Self-management skills
Self-management skills enable you to work effectively in different types of situations with a variety of people. Examples include: meeting deadlines, being motivated and showing initiative.
Specialist skills
Specialist skills usually relate to a specific job or group of jobs. Examples include: fluency in a language, ability to use specific computer programmes or technical equipment.
It's important to identify the broad range of skills and competencies you have developed through recreational and community activities or in the home. Competencies gained in this way may include:
- the ability to take responsibility
- organisational skills
- interpersonal skills
- decision-making skills
- effective management of people
- ability to analyse, evaluate and solve problems
- flexibility in dealing with the unexpected.
Assess your skills
We have a number of tools that can help you to assess your skill set and work out what skills you like using, so that you can apply them to jobs you might be interested in.
- Exercises to help you identify your skills (PDF 32 KB). (Requires at least Adobe Acrobat Reader, Version 3, which can be downloaded from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html)
- Match your skills to jobs with Skill Matcher
- Explore your skills and interests and match these with jobs in Pathfinder
Once you have analysed your skills, you can then:
- investigate what jobs use the skills you like using most by looking at the Job info section of our website
- work out what skills you would like to develop and investigate how you can do that. Check out courses and training in our Education and training information section!
