Types of Skills
The skills you have can generally be divided into three groups, as categorized by Sidney Fine: functional, adaptive, work content skills.
Functional skills, or transferable skills, are more general. They reflect talents and aptitudes, both natural and developed, and include such broad skill areas as; managing, organizing, co-attitude, writing, and analyzing. These skills, while maybe developed in a specific context and time frame, are nonetheless transferable to a variety of other situations.
Adaptive skills are developed from life experiences, oft-times early life experiences, and include such personal qualities as: flexibility, leadership, patience, responsibility, self-reliance, maturity, decisiveness, and independence. These skills are marketable too-do not underestimate them!
Work contents skills a are developed for specific positions. These skills be obtained in a made
Job hunters tend to place too much end basis on work content skills and ignore functional and adaptive skills. Content skills require specific training whereas functional and adaptive skills are usually developed out of life experiences. Consequently, the latter skills are easily undervalued because they were developed more easily. Natural talents usually fall into this category as well.
One study, fifty-four percent of the companies surveyed reported that the critical difference between those who get hired and those who do not are adaptive skills such as commitment, interest, initiative, fitting in, assertiveness, enthusiasm, and intelligence. Functional skills such as communication, interpersonal skills, meeting deadlines, and ability to answer questions ranked as being the crucial difference for thirty-eight percent of the companies.
The top ten functional and adaptive non-technical skills named by 48 employers were:
To see how functional and adaptive skills developed as a student can be transferred to the duties and responsibilities of a career position, carefully review the following diagram.
Following are several activities for assisting you in identifying your own full range of skills.
Step for Identifying Skills and Abilities
Individual Action: One way to get started identifying skills and abilities that will be relevant to your job search is to systematically list such skills. Think about what you do well. Make a list of those abilities you possess without regard to their marketability.
Consider those things at which you naturally excel along with those things you have been taught or trained to do. Think about those skills you enjoy using. Identify from your list those skills which you most enjoy using and which you feel are your strongest
Group Action: If you have difficulty describing your skills, ask several individuals who know you well to help you. Ask a friend to describe you to an imaginary employer. What do you hear about yourself? Begin making a list of those skills. Try to remember times when you were praised for a task well done. Note, too, any areas of special knowledge you might have.
Extracting Your Skills from Your Experience
Describe in detail five experiences or accomplishments which you feel provided you an opportunity to show what you can do. These experiences might have happened in a paid part-time or summer job, while doing volunteer work, or while involved in an academic project or extracurricular activity. Here are some sample experiences to show the possibilities you might consider.
Volunteer Work-I advised freshmen and sophomores in college about their general education requirements and some of the planning involved in choosing their majors. I helped them get through the system's bureaucracy by acting as a liaison and referral person in problems with faculty, departments, and school staff, including administrators. I also explained and clarified the college's rules and regulations to the students so that they became less hassled and better able to work with or around them.
Academic Project-For my political science project I studied Oak land's upper middle and upper classes' awareness of and position on current political issues. This involved developing a questionnaire, surveying individuals at their homes, compiling responses, drawing conclusions, and preparing a final report.
Extracurricular Activity-One of the most exciting college activities that I was involved in was the organization of "Homecoming Week." As chairperson of that week, I had the opportunity to work with a variety of people, and to coordinate a diverse range of programs. These included: production of a concert, publication of a magazine for campus-wide distribution, sponsorship of the national Frisbee contest, and the introduction of a new activity in which materials were provided to the student body for a craft-making day.
Individual Action: Underline the skills found in the experiences you just described. Again check those skills which you most enjoy using and which you feel are your strongest.
Group Action: Read experiences aloud to each other. Help each other extract the skills which are both explicit and implicit in the experiences.
Use the following lists of functional skills and adaptive skills to stimulate your thinking and to broaden your skills vocabulary.
Career Planning
We will now integrate the Action Steps just complete comprehensive activity.
Take each skill you have identified from the previous Action Steps and transfer them one at a time to the following chart. For each skill, reflect back on experiences in which you have successfully used that particular skill. Then, rank your enjoyment level and your performance level in this skill area. Fill in each column before listing the next skill. The final summary of the previous skill identification activities is a list specifically tailored for you by you.
Step Skills Summary
When you have completed filling in the Skill Areas chart, the last Action Step, review your rankings of your enjoyment and performance levels and make a prioritized list of the ten skills with the highest combined rankings. Add the top five to the summary sheet at the end of this unit. These are the skills which are likely to play the most important part in your future work.
