Analysing your skills

Analysing your skills

In the last two articles, I addressed five questions which should help you in defining the main areas you should focus on in order to take your career development seriously. This introductory analysis can be concluded by making the following observations.

In order for people to overcome the reasons that cause them to fail in their careers they need to:

understand their reasons for failure;

understand and apply a range of personal and business skills, which are the building blocks of career development;

know and preferably learn the techniques that will be explained in future articles.

Planning the direction of your career is the critical element in ensuring success. The system and techniques best used to analyse career development are based on the analysis of activity as shown below.

Every task has three components:

the planning of the task;

the carrying out of the task;

recording and analysing the experience gained from the task.

Most people concentrate the majority of their efforts on planning and executing the task. However, people tend not to spend as much time as they should on planning for two reasons:

they have not had the experience of reflecting on or analysing the task they are about to do or;

they are under pressure to produce a result.

High-performance people tend to concentrate more efforts on planning than low-performance people, so that the execution of the task goes more smoothly, and that the people involved understand they are committed to the project.

Recording and analysing experience is something generally neglected.

Again, people have not been trained to understand the crucial importance of the fact that what you do every single day will mould what you achieve in the rest of your career.

The Experience Evaluation Sheet (EES) included here gives you an idea of the wide range of essential management/executive skills that you must acquire to ensure career progression. These skills contrast with the technical/operational skills which many people acquire but which in themselves do not produce the advancement they seek.

This EES helps you focus your learning on the core management/executive skills necessary in almost any job. To maximise your learning and career progression you must, at some stage, undergo most of these essential experiences by asking

which of these are applicable to your current tasks;

which of these you must master and to what degree to advance your career;

which of these have you set as a learning objective and how will this learning occur;

which of these does your boss or company expect you to acquire or display.

Addressing experiences in the EES list of Management/Executive Skills (below) and ascertaining their relevance to your goals is the essence of self-reliance and self-development. It will ensure that continuous self-training is a daily reality and something by which to judge your progress.

In future articles, I will address the issues maximising your career development efforts by:

identifying your learning style via a ‘Learning Styles’ questionnaire;

identifying the activities and opportunities best suited to your learning style;

carrying out regular work experience reviews.

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