Personal Development Finding Out What youre Good At

Personal Development Finding Out What youre Good At What are you good at? If youre anything like me, its easy to talk about what youve done or what you know, but genuinely working out what you are good at is pretty hard. Im not sure if its a British attitude that naturally prefers self-deprecating but Im pretty sure a lot of it comes from the fact that ability can be a bit hard to get hold of us a concept. The big problem with this is that to successfully manage your career, knowing what youre good at is vital. Firstly, if you dont have a clear idea about what to do with your future, your abilities can be as good a place as any to start. This is what I found leaving uni with a History degree under my belt. I didnt have a profession I particularly wanted to go into; nor did I have something I believed in that I wanted to get behind, but I did have something I thought I was good at researching stuff. Secondly, to put it simply, employers want to hire people who can do what they want and in a packed field theyre going to go for the people who can convince them they are best at what they want them to do. Its one thing knowing what good communication is, but are you good at it, and could you persuade a prospective employer that youre good at it? I reckon one way to come up with this sort of information about yourself is to think about what you have been good at in the past. Real life evidence gives us confidence in our opinions about ourselves and makes it easier to persuade a recruiter. This idea underpins a little exercise I use called an SKA story.   It comes in two parts. Firstly, write down five occasions when you achieved something youre proud of, or were particularly excited about achieving at the time. Of the five, its a good idea to pick at least one example which is extra-curricular, at least one from work/study and one which is at least five years old. It probably works best if you write each occasion on a separate piece of paper, add a short description of the event, if you want. Secondly, you need to work out how you achieved this. The learning theorist Benjamin Bloom came up with three different types of learning. We can use these to pinpoint what you used to achieve your successes. Blooms three types of learning are SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE and ATTITUDES. These can be defined as follows: SKILLS: These are the abilities we need to perform a task, e.g.: to pass a driving test, you need good observation skills, anticipation, judgement, reactions, etc. KNOWLEDGE: This is the knowledge that was needed to complete the task, e.g.: to pass a driving test you need to know how a car operates and about the highway code. ATTITUDES: This is to do with having the emotional and personal facets to do something, e.g.: passing a diving test requires perseverance to learn and calmness in the actual test. For each of your examples try and list at least three things in each of these categories. Doing this across five examples should begin to build up repeated patterns of what you have used to accomplish your achievements in the past. You should see repeated attributes that you used repeatedly. It may also show you how youve developed these facets. Working through this builds up a bigger picture of who you are, and what you are good at. This bigger picture can be useful for yourself knowing how you want to develop towards your goals, when writing an application, or in an interview. I find a lot of graduates are stronger on what they know about the outside world of work and the knowledge they have gained from their course, but weaker on what they know about themselves. I think this sort of exercise really helps with this. Why not give it a try? Also Read