You Got Skills
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.
