Finding your strongest skills

Finding your strongest skills, especially your strongest "soft" skills, can sometimes require a little help from your friends!

Soft skills, to recap, are skills such as communication or attitude, which are invisible, and sometimes difficult to measure or assess.

Here are 2 ways to come up with your strongest soft skills.

The first way you can do by yourself.

Think carefully about things you do that you consider so simple that "anybody can do that." Be open minded, because you really do believe that anybody can do these things, so you probably don't hold them in very high esteem.

For example, are you always so busy, and always doing so many things at once that you assume anyone can cope with that? If so, you have the still of multi-tasking - and everybody does NOT have that skill, which is very much in demand in todays multi-tasking workplace.

Can you take a chaotic mess and make order and neatness from it? If so you have organizational skill. And, no, not every has that either. It's another very marketable skill.

These are just two examples, but there are many, many more possiblities. Take some time to go over what you do, almost unconscious of the fact you are really "doing" anything, and write down what it is you do.

There is nothing on this planet that "everybody can do." By identifying what is really easy and natural for you, you are zeroing in on strong soft skills that could help you get hired.

The other way is where you family and friends come in.

Ask as many family members and close friends as possible to tell you what they think you are best at doing and what they value you for. The rule here is they are not allowed to tell you you are good at whatever you are trained for in the workplace. For example, if you are a bookkeeper, they are not allowed to tell you you are good at bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is not a skill, it is a grouping of many skills. We are looking for individual skills.

However if you cannot get them to focus on the individual skills, take what you can get then sit down yourself and work out what skills that must involve. If you feel self conscious going through all this for yourself, think of it as being someone else and write down all the skills this imaginary person must have to be able to do whatever your friends and family said.

Keep you list of skills, and keep with it a list of what you were thinking of when you came up with each skill, so when you are looking for a job, you not only know you have these skills, but can back them up with stories both in your resume and at an interview.

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