Matching Your Skills to Appropriate Jobs

Know your skills

Skills refer to the things you do well or the tasks you perform well; so for example, someone who writes well can be described as having good writing skills. It follows then, that a key to finding the most appropriate job in a given industry is to recognize and understand your own skills and communicating their significance – written as well as verbally – to a probable employer.

A majority of the most viable skills are those that are most used in various types of work settings. What are these skills? Would you be successful matching your skills with the job being offered in order to find the right job?

Determine your skills. This will help you in becoming the lead candidate for landing your ideal job. A skill does not necessarily have to be something that was adapted in a work environment. If this would be your first job hunt and you have no job experience to date, you still have a chance in the industry.

Hobby skills help

In more cases than not, skills – including knowledge-based and transferable – could be absorbed and developed as a volunteer, a student, a homemaker, or in many of your other personal activities. The skills you have used for these activities can still be applied to your desired job.

Organizing and listing your personal skills could help you easily fill out job applications, provide useful information for job interviews, and prepare quality resumes. First, you should categorize these skills by separating your interests and aptitudes from your work experience.

Aptitudes & interests

Aptitudes and interest include all of your hobbies, activities in which you have been involved in the past, and all the things that interest you. By making a list of these qualities, you could examine the skills it takes to achieve each item.

Skills from aptitude and interest may be homemaking, playing basketball, fixing cars and others. All of these items could determine if you are capable of working with a team; able to handle multiple tasks; have viable knowledge of human development; have knowledge of electronics and the ability to diagnose mechanical and numerical problems. The list goes on, but make sure to consider the skills that would be most appropriate for a working environment.

Work history

Work history includes volunteer, part-time, freelance, summer and full time jobs. Once you have listed all your past employment and the duties carried out in those positions, examine the skills you utilized to perform those duties and how they will relate to the new job.

Ask for help. As soon as you have your list ready, you could now go to job services that could help you acquire your desired job. You could also search the job yourself. However, always remember to match the skills and abilities in your list to the needed skills and abilities of various jobs.

In most cases, people who seek jobs are threatened with job titles. This should not be the case because as long as your skills and abilities are adequate enough to meet requirements of the workload and job title, the possibility of acquiring your desired job increases.