Part 1: Skills 

By Brian Lambier

Welcome to our five part blog series “Career Change Taking Stock of Yourself!” which will focus on five key areas for you to consider to better understand prioir to starting your career s change process. We will explore skills, values, interests, personality, motivation and in addition we will offer posting that will explore a variety of different factors to consider when changing careers including; work culture,compenastaion and benefits, location and several others.  We all have skills that we have developed through different parts of life but sometimes what seems obvious is not too easy to clearly articulate. In escence, skills are the concrete abilities that you have that you demonstrate with consistency at work. Skills can be achieved through many different activities and can be categorized into three different types of including; technical, transferable, and self- management skills. About.com Job Searching  shares The Top Skills Employers Seek in Job Applicants

1. Techical skills: Simply put, these are the skills that you have gained through your formal training or on the job training, transferrable are the ones that you have developed in a variety of circles of your life including work, school, recreation, volunteerism, etc.  

2. Functional Transferrable Skills: These are the skills acquired during any activity in your life — jobs, classes, projects, parenting, hobbies, sports, virtually anything — that are transferable and applicable to what you want to do in your next job

3. Self- Management Skills:  are those skills that are the intangible parts of you character that most people have but often  underestimate their importance  when changing careers but most employers highly regard and covet when looking for new employees. Some examples of these are resilience, dependable, fair-minded, business, hardworking. I always look at these things as the action of the values you believe in. We will have more on values later!

As mentioned many people have difficulty identifying their skills. Here is a little trick.to help you define your skills.Take a pen and piece of paper or for people with more finely tuned computer skills your computer word processor and make three columns. Provide the following information in each column;

• First column carefully identify and list the 10 tasks that you do at work that are most crucial to carrying out the responsibilities of your job.

• Second  column identify all the things and steps you do to complete each of your top 10 tasks .

• Third column identify the skills you are required to do each of those tasks.

• Categorize each skill as either technical, functional transferrable or self -management skills

It is a deconstruction of a job descriptions of sorts!  Happy Skills Hunting!

Coming Soon Part 2: Values

Brian Lambier has over 26 years of experience in the human resources, career and retirement coaching fields and is presently President/Owner of Career Vitality Services Inc. in Calgary The Career Vitality Services team believe that the cornerstone to service is to help you discover your passion so you can live your dream.