Module 4 - Career Planning

Unit 7: Preferred Skills

Recognising Your Preferred Skills

Congratulations! You have developed a comprehensive list of skills that you possess. You can now determine which of these skills you prefer to use, and relate these to the skills associated with your potential career and your set of necessary working conditions.

We all have a wide range of skills (over 500, according to some researchers!), but we may not be interested in using all of them in our careers. Instead, there are some skills that we find more enjoyable, easier or more successful, and want to continue using; these are our preferred skills.

When you are looking at job ads, look for matches between your preferred skills and the required skills of the position. These skills should be emphasised in your resume and any relevant interview.

Activity
For this activity, look at the list of skills that you created for the previous unit and decide which of them you are most interested in using in future work and how often you would like to use them. You might want to use some skills only occasionally, while others you would like to use more regularly. You probably also have skills that you hope you don’t have to use at all!