Unlock Your Potential: Identify Your Hidden Skills for Career Success

Discovering Your Skill Set

This guide will help you pinpoint your skills. While it might seem obvious, many individuals undergoing career changes or seeking advancement often underestimate their abilities. Let's explore the process of identifying both your known and hidden talents.

The plan includes exploring our methodology, how we conceptualize and define skills, and then discussing your natural talents and acquired skills. We'll also help you uncover those skills you might not even know you possess. Finally, we'll touch on energizers – activities you enjoy and excel at. The primary goal is to equip you with the knowledge to recognize and document your inherent strengths, learned skills, and passion-driving activities.

Our Approach to Skills

Let's take a moment to consider the career exploration journey and where skills fit in. First, it's essential to understand your values and style – those inherent qualities that define you. Next comes your skills and interests, and the synergy between them.

This understanding allows you to explore various career paths and determine the right fit. Then you can evaluate your options, develop a strategic plan, and pursue your goals. In this section, we'll concentrate on skills and their pivotal role within the broader context of fulfilling work – residing at the intersection of style, values, and skills.

When your style aligns with your skills, it results in strengths and talents – things you're naturally adept at. The fusion of skills and interests creates energizers, those activities that excite and motivate you. This is how we view skills, emphasizing natural strengths and energizers. Our framework for thinking about skills encompasses these natural strengths (talents that come naturally), acquired skills (learned through experience or practice), and energizers.

Skills are important because they're the currency of your career. Employers ultimately hire based on what you can do, not just what you want to do. While it's certainly possible to pursue opportunities that allow for knowledge expansion and on-the-job learning, it's crucial to demonstrate existing abilities when seeking employment. Companies seek individuals who can address specific skill gaps.

Consider a job description: they are packed with required skills. Companies explicitly state their needs for abilities such as growth marketing or analytical capabilities. The presence of terms like "skill," "capability," and "knowledge of" throughout these descriptions underscores the importance of possessing these abilities.

That’s why it's vital to thoroughly understand and document your skills, even those you take for granted. These often-overlooked talents are what enable you to pursue exciting opportunities. As you plan your job search or career change, take a deep dive to identify your capabilities. Champion yourself, because many tend to underestimate their abilities.

Remember, you are a salesperson, and you are the product. Become familiar with your product's features – your skills and abilities. Focusing on and documenting your skills is essential.

Natural Strengths

Natural strengths are sometimes referred to as talents. What exactly is a strength? It's an ability that comes naturally. Some people are naturally gifted at drawing, singing, or playing music. Others might be athletic or have a knack for numbers. These strengths, whether innate or developed, come easily to you.

These are things that are easier for you than others, and these are strengths. We want to understand those, and we want to lean into them as much as we can. It’s important to understand these things that come naturally to us.

Your work style can be a valuable guide for identifying these strengths, as it often reveals what comes easily to you. While individual experiences vary, these natural tendencies are often taken for granted.

Work style assessments can be incredibly helpful in understanding your natural strengths. Especially a 360-degree assessment, where you can see how others view your abilities.

Ones tend to get more energized from starting things and starting activities. The threes and fours tend to be more energized from finishing things and bringing things to conclusion. When we go to the other axes, the two and the three tend to have that higher people orientation and pursuit of connection. The ones and fours tend to have more of that result orientation and pursuit of autonomy.

Here are some primary styles and their corresponding strengths:

• Primary One: Direct communication, decisiveness
• Primary Two: Connecting with people, leading with influence
• Primary Three: Patience, empathy, responsiveness, listening
• Primary Four: Analytical skills, quality focus, structural thinking

Leverage your work style to uncover those often-overlooked natural strengths. A 360-degree assessment can also reveal blind spots, highlighting abilities you might not recognize in yourself. Pay close attention to how others perceive your strengths and ensure you document them. Incorporating these strengths into your resume can be very useful.

Acquired Skills

Acquired skills are those that don't come naturally but are developed over time through learning. An acquired skill is defined as an ability gained through learning, deliberate practice, experience, or formal education.

To identify these skills, examine past experiences where you've demonstrated abilities. Look at your resume and achievements. Identify skills that might be granular or broad and strategic. Document these skills to create a comprehensive catalog of your capabilities.

While this might seem exhaustive, it's important to recognize these skills because they are features to your product. This catalog will be valuable when you need to promote yourself. You'll also be able to determine which skills you enjoy using and which you don't.

Many possess skills they prefer not to use, and this is crucial to know when finding fulfilling and energizing work.

Consider the "resolution" of a skill – both micro and macro levels. Document both broad and detailed skills.

• Low Resolution (Broad): Sales, design, recruitment
• High Resolution (Detailed): Specific software, tools, or techniques

When evaluating career opportunities, some companies will focus on high-resolution skills, while others will emphasize low-resolution skills. The level of role often correlates with the skill resolution. Senior roles typically require broad strategies, while junior roles demand specific tools and tactics.

Document your skills in a comfortable way. You might start with broad categories or focus on specific tools and techniques. Then, you can group them accordingly. Hopefully, this provides a useful framework for thinking about your skills.

Uncover Your Skills

It's important to address those skills we often take for granted, or may not even realize we possess. Many people have thoughts like, "I don't know how to do that," or "I don't have that ability." It's time to help you recognize those hidden talents and abilities.

We all have more skills than we realize. Introspection and recognizing our abilities can be challenging. It requires self-advocacy, self-promotion, and a degree of bragging, which can be uncomfortable. Now's the time to embrace it, especially when thinking about yourself.

Consider times in your past when you felt fulfilled and energized and developed skills.

• Have you planned a big event/trip?
• Were you part of a team or a club?
• Did you excel in a school subject?
• What have you been the "go-to" for?

These are ways to reflect on your past and identify moments where you stepped up and demonstrated skills. Focus on documenting these abilities, regardless of whether you enjoyed them or not.

For example, planning a wedding involves a complex series of events. Consider the skills you gained:

• Planning and organizational skills
• Vendor vetting
• Negotiation
• Design

Claim these skills and feel proud of them. Although you may not want to say that you acquired them in the context of wedding planning, you have proof that you've done it, and you should have the confidence to say that you have these skills.

You may have blind spots regarding your skills. Since abilities are relative, we often become our own worst critics. You might think, "I know how to do that, but I'm not that good at it." However, compared to a novice, you might be incredible!

Self-evaluation is often tough because we lack a benchmark. Be generous with your assessment and ask others for feedback.

• What are my 3-5 greatest skills?
• What comes naturally to me?
• What do I know a lot about?
• What kind of work do you think would align well with my skills?

Ask past managers, direct reports, and colleagues for insights. Discover abilities you didn't know you had. Perhaps your team thinks you're a great manager, even if you don't give yourself credit for it. This is a great way to uncover your abilities.

Energizers

Energizers exist where skill meets interest. You'll likely feel most satisfied when your work engages you in activities you're both skilled at and enjoy.

Consider where your skills fall on this matrix:

• Is it a skill? (Are you good at it?)
• Do you want to do more or less of it?

Plotting your skills on this matrix will reveal a lot about the kind of work you should be doing.

The four quadrants can be defined as follows:

• Asset: A skill you don't want to do more of, to be used if needed.
• Drainer: Something you want to do less of and aren't good at.
• Potential: Something you want to do more of, but isn't yet a skill.
• Energizer: Something you like doing, want to do more of, and are good at.

Prioritize energizers. Double down on strengths that you enjoy and find interesting, as these tend to energize you. This creates a positive cycle: by doing what you're good at, you'll get even better.

It's always worth incorporating strengths in a resume, so when you ultimately go and pursue these career opportunities, you bring those to the surface if they're relevant to a job.

Wrap Up

Identifying your skills is a transformative process. It allows you to recognize your abilities and recontextualize your experiences.

Think about the activities you've done and how they reveal your skills. These skills are what make you marketable. The ones you enjoy will energize you and propel you toward a fulfilling career.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I differentiate between hard skills and soft skills when identifying my own?

Hard skills are specific, teachable abilities that can be defined and measured, such as proficiency in a foreign language or computer programming. Soft skills, on the other hand, are less tangible and relate to one's personality traits, such as communication, leadership, or problem-solving. To identify your own, list down tasks you excel at in your job or daily life and categorize them into technical abilities (hard skills) and interpersonal or creative abilities (soft skills).

What techniques can I use to uncover skills I might not realize I have?

Reflect on past experiences and consider situations where you've successfully adapted or solved problems. Ask for feedback from colleagues, friends, or mentors who might offer insights into your abilities. Additionally, try taking skills assessments or personality tests that can reveal hidden talents or strengths you haven't yet recognized.

How can identifying my skills and interests help me in my career development?

Knowing your skills and interests allows you to seek out career opportunities and roles that align with your strengths, leading to greater job satisfaction and performance. It also helps you identify areas for professional development and can be a powerful tool in crafting your resume, cover letter, and in preparing for job interviews, as you can confidently discuss your competencies.