What do they mean by "skills"?

Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose. -John Stossel

I never used the word “skills.” Maybe, once or twice, when someone was really good at basketball, yo-yoing, beer pong, or graffiti, I commented on their “mad skillz.” But, until recently, I had never even asked myself if I had any skills. The only time I even thought about skills was when a job application had a space for “Relevant Skills.”

Even as I was filling out the form, I didn’t really know what skills were. If someone asked me, “What are your transferable skills?” I would look at them blankly. If they would have asked about my “marketable skills,” my jaw would probably have hung open.  Whadda’ ya mean?

Yet, after I began researching proven job-hunting strategies and going after my dream job, I realized a simple truth:

Knowing your skills and how to talk about them is essential if you want to find your dream job.

Luckily, knowing your skills and laying the groundwork for talking about them is accomplished with a little time (2-6 hours), a few pieces of paper, and a willingness to reminisce about your past successes.

For me, this exercise was life-changing – it revealed the types of activities that I really loved and gave me the focus I needed to pursue my dream job.

If you’re not convinced that you have any marketable or transferable skills, do not fear, you have skills you don’t even recognize. After all, anything that you can do well is a skill. Anything that you do well can be transferable. Anything you do well can be marketable.

You got skills. Get to know them.

This article describes, step by step, how to happily inventory and prioritize your top skills. There are links to the same tools that we use in the Dream Job Workshop.  The process involves some very informal writing, and can take anywhere from 2-6 hours – more if you really get into it, but if that happens, you’ll be happy to spend the time doing it.

This article is part two of the Dream Job Workshop Series. Part one

Why Do A Skills Inventory?

A skills inventory – a list of what you can do – has many benefits.

• Feel happier. Knowing what you can do builds confidence. Also, dwelling on good experiences, which happens to be the first step in the process I explain below, is proven to increase your chances of being happy. There was even a study about it:

…the average unhappy person spends more than twice as much time thinking about unpleasant events in their lives, while happy people tend to seek out and rely upon information that brightens their personal outlook. -Sonja Lyubomirsky

• Discern your path. Discovering or simply defining your top skills will help you zero in on your dream job. You may uncover some skills you don’t normally think about, skills you haven’t gotten a chance to use in your past jobs, skills that put you in a state a flow, skills that make you forget to look at the clock. In other words, dream job material.
• Tell me about yourself. We live in a culture where the only appropriate time to discuss ourselves is when we are on a therapist’s couch or across an interviewer’s desk. Maybe that’s why we don’t like to  “toot our own horn.” Or perhaps it’s simply because we don’t want to look like an arrogant ass.  Whatever the reason, most of our lives, despite the fact that we spend more time with ourselves than anyone else, we avoid talking about ourselves. Yet the first thing out of most interviewer’s mouths… “Tell me about yourself.” By doing a skills inventory similar to the one I describe below, you will not only be able to speak fluently about what you can do, but you will have anecdotes at the tip of your tongue that prove it.
• Knowing what you skills you need. Although you have naturally developed a plethora of skills just by being alive, you probably want to learn more. What skills they are depends on 1) what you’d like to learn and 2) what your dream job requires. A skills inventory will help you in both cases. 1) A skills inventory helps you understand what kind of skills you like most. 2) By placing your list of skills alongside the list of skills that your dream job requires, and noting which skills you have yet to master, you can easily create a road-map of the skills you need to learn.

It is important to do what you don’t know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos. -Carlos Casteneda

Not Just a List

I’ve called a skills inventory “a list of what you can do,” but there’s more to it. A good skills inventory will help you discover what you most enjoy doing.

Here’s why it’s important to not only discover your skills, but to pick your favorites:

Let’s say you are incredibly skilled at research because of your work-study job at the library, but you don’t enjoy it. Nevertheless, this is a skill that you can talk easily about, one that is in the front of your consciousness. When people ask you what you do, you say, “I’m a researcher.” As you anxiously scan Craigslist, you find yourself applying for research jobs. Worse, you get a research job. But you don’t like researching. You like painting and gardening. Or problem-solving. Or communicating.

Just because you are good at something doesn’t mean you should be doing it.

Besides, if you love doing something, you are more likely to excel at it.

Think about what you like doing, not what the job market tells you it needs.

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that it is worth it to spend a few hours identifying and prioritizing your skills. If you aren’t ready to put in the time, and you are very self-aware, you could simply download this list of skills and check off your favorites. But I’m willing to bet it won’t make you as happy.

If you’ve done a skills inventory please share about the experience in the comments.

Tell a Story

The first step is to think of a time when you accomplished a goal, overcame a difficulty, solved a problem, or created something you were proud of. It doesn’t matter if it happened at work, at school, or in your personal life.

Write about it.

Note to reluctant writers: This doesn’t have to be more than a page or so, and no one will be checking your grammar or spelling. You don’t have to compose a masterpiece. The act of writing your story of accomplishment, even if it is painful, will increase your ability to remember and re-tell the story when you need it most – a job interview.

• Describe what the situation, problem, or goal was and what you did, step-by-step.
• It doesn’t have to be a long story, but it shouldn’t leave out any of the important action.
• If at all possible, it should also include a measure of success. This might mean you received a good grade or evaluation, sold 3,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies or simply that a road trip continued because of the flat tire you fixed.
• Be specific.
• I also think it is a fun idea to give your story of accomplishment a title.

So, to recap:

Write a story of accomplishment. Include:

• the specific problem solved, challenge overcome, or goal achieved
• the specific actions taken
• any specific measures of success
• a title (optional)

I Told You, You Got Skills

Once you’ve written your story and basked in the glow of your past glory, download and print this skills list. If you want to save ink and paper, just print the last four pages, but don’t print on both sides, you’ll want to spread them out and see them all at once.

Go through the entire list and check off the skills this story demonstrates. Don’t worry about which skills you like the most yet; that will come later.

The next step is to do the whole thing over again. Write another story, inventory the skills demonstrated. Then do it again. And again, until you have written and inventoried seven stories.

You can spread this exercise over a few days or churn it out on a weekend. The important thing is to savor your success. Get a good taste for the feeling of doing things well.

If you are having trouble thinking of seven accomplishments, broaden your concept of accomplishment. If you made a friend feel better – that’s an accomplishment. If you balanced your checkbook – that’s an accomplishment. If you solved a Rubik’s Cube, you’ve accomplished something. If you are still stuck, think about a time when you were immersed in something, when you lost track of the minutes or hours. Chances are, you were exercising one or more of your skills.

Another highly recommended step is to have another person read your story and check off the skills that they see. I’ve provided two extra columns for this, but you may want to print up another skills list for them. Another perspective may bring out important skills that are not obvious to you.

Choosing Your Favorites

Now that you have check-marks or Xs in all seven columns of the skills list, lay them out on a table. It’s time to pick your top skills.

Use a different color pen and mark the skills that appeared often – those that have 4-7 check-marks going right across the row.

Remember that our goal is to pick our favorites, not the things we think are most valuable to “them.”

Start putting a line through the skills that you don’t enjoy.

At some point, you’ll need to decide how many you want to pick. Don’t pick many more than 10, because too many skills will not help you focus on your ideal skills or remember how to talk about them.

Prioritizing

After you have narrowed it down to 5-10 skills, it is time to rank them in order of preference. If you are like me, this is easier said than done. That is why I’ve included a simple tool that will help you decide. I call it The Prioritizer. Basically, it is like entering your skills in a tournament with each other.

Here’s how to use The Prioritizer:

1. Enter the skills you picked in the spaces marked “A-J”
2. Put skill “A” in competition with the other skills, one at a time. Circle the “winner”.
3. Do the same for the remaining skills.
4. Tally the total “wins” for each skill
5. If there are any “ties,” set them against each other and add an extra point to the “winners” tally.
6. When every skill has a different number of “wins” write them out highest to lowest.

Ta-da! You now know your top skills.

Not only that, you have seven stories to pick from if you are ever asked to give examples of times when you demonstrated specific skills.

Stay tuned for the next installment of the Dream Job Workshop series – Dream Accounting.

Dream Job Workshop