Planning your career path around your personal strengths is a smart way to align your work with your passions, talents, and values. It can help you find more satisfaction, fulfillment, and success in your professional life. But how do you identify your strengths and use them to guide your career choices? Here are some tips to help you.
The first step is to assess your strengths, which are the qualities, skills, and abilities that you excel at and enjoy doing. You can use various tools and methods to discover your strengths, such as self-reflection, feedback, personality tests, and online quizzes. Some examples of popular frameworks for identifying your strengths are the CliftonStrengths assessment, the VIA Character Strengths survey, and the StrengthsFinder 2.0 book. These can help you pinpoint your top strengths and how they relate to your work preferences and performance.
Usually it's hard to notice your own strengths. When you're strong in something, it comes easy to you and you don't realize how hard this skill might be for other people. Ask people around you what they consider your strengths.
Recently, I had the privilege of sharing my journey with a group of young professionals eager to navigate their own career paths. I guided them through similar self-discovery exercises, witnessing their excitement as they identified their strengths and brainstormed potential career alignments. The impact was profound. Several found renewed purpose and direction, shifting their career goals towards roles that truly resonated with their strengths and aspirations. The most rewarding aspect for me however, was seeing their eyes light up with hope and excitement, when they realized that fulfillment is a tangible possibility within their reach.
I think it’s more important to align with your interests than with your strengths. Your strengths often come from things you practiced, and they may have been practiced out of necessity, not by choice. Without deep consideration of your interests, your pursuits would be drudgery.
Sometimes assessments should come from outside of you. I love creating an anonymous questionnaire from google forms and sharing it with my trusted friends, former co-workers, and family once a year. I ask various questions regarding my emotional intelligence, personality, personal/professional brand, work life balance, what I could improve, what have I accomplished, etc. These people really have an outside perspective but can shed a lot of light on your assets or weaknesses. Sometimes we forget all that we've done or didn't do. Give people the opportunity to enable you. Take what you need from their advice and leave what you don't respectfully.
Assessing strengths can be challenging, especially with long-term experience. We often overlook our expertise, thinking "Anyone can do what I do.” Here's how to identify your strengths and skills: 1. Take a moment to look back at pivotal moments in your career journey. Recall specific situations where you had to rise to the occasion, take the lead, or overcome significant challenges. 2. Seek feedback from trusted contacts to gain insights you may have missed. Sometimes, others can offer valuable insights that we might overlook ourselves. 3. Analyze your typical workweek tasks and the skills required to tackle them.
Once you have a clear idea of your strengths, you can explore your options for career paths that match them. You can research different occupations, industries, and roles that require or benefit from your strengths. You can also look for opportunities to use your strengths in your current or desired field, such as projects, tasks, or responsibilities that suit your strengths. You can also network with people who share your strengths or work in areas that interest you, and ask them for advice, insights, or referrals.
Additional tip: Don't forget you can also create yoru own opportunity. Sometimes we get so busy looking for someone to give us something that we should be creating. When a job didn't offer me a direct role in DEI I decided to built it in. I researched who the key stakeholders were and scheduled meetings to seek out pain points. Then I decided on what actions I could take. When there was nothing at work for me I built programs for my own community. I never waited for someone else to tell me I can when I knew I could. I used what I had to network and inspire others. In return I learned more. Think outside of the workplace. Someone somewhere needs your strengths and insights.
Patricia, I love your suggestions; they will work for the individual who wants to feel fulfilled about their occupation. Self-actualization occurs when we realize that operating with our gifts and talents is what provides us with satisfaction. Too often, we expect others to validate and create opportunities for us. Once we take the blinders off, the sky is the limit!
After you have narrowed down your options, you can set your goals for your career path based on your strengths. You can use the SMART framework to make your goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, if one of your strengths is creativity, you might set a goal to pursue a career in graphic design, apply for a relevant course or certification, create a portfolio of your work, and land a job in a creative agency within a year.
I love SMART goals for pragmatic stuff. Finding work that gives you meaning, helps you know yourself and discover strengths in order to grow: maybe not always the best use-case of SMART goals. It's hard to quantify certain aspects of personal fulfillment and self-discovery. Additionally, in a highly volatile market and ever-changing environment with an infinite number of uncontrollable factors, you need to be ready to adapt your goals. I think cultivating a career around your strengths isn't just about setting and achieving precise KPIs, it's more about nurturing a sense of purpose, staying open to new experiences, and trying to stay agile.
To plan your career path around your strengths, you also need to develop them further and keep them updated. You can do this by seeking feedback, learning new skills, taking on challenges, and finding mentors or coaches who can support you. You can also look for ways to showcase your strengths, such as volunteering, freelancing, blogging, or joining professional associations. By developing your strengths, you can increase your confidence, credibility, and value in the job market.
During this phase, individuals with multiple strengths should assess how to customize their next steps based on their interests. Sometimes, we have strengths we want to utilize in our hobbies versus our career work. The areas I am enthusiastic about today are new to me, making the next step in the journey exciting. It is always possible to learn!
While focusing on your strengths is important, you also need to balance them with other aspects of your career path, such as your interests, values, needs, and weaknesses. You don't want to neglect or ignore the areas that you need to improve or that are essential for your success. You also want to make sure that your strengths are aligned with what matters to you and what motivates you. You can use tools such as the Holland Code, the Career Values Scale, or the Career Interests Inventory to help you find this balance.
Finally, you need to review your progress regularly and adjust your career path accordingly. You can use tools such as the SWOT analysis, the Career Development Plan, or the Career Action Plan to help you evaluate your situation, identify your opportunities and threats, and plan your next steps. You can also celebrate your achievements, reward yourself, and seek feedback from others. By reviewing your progress, you can ensure that your career path is still based on your strengths and that you are moving towards your goals.
Knowing my personal values brought me a better understanding of the strong points as well as helped to identify the potential and accept the weaknesses. Get closer to your own values start with these simple questions: - if time were not a problem, how would look a week of your life? - if money were not a problem, what would you choose to do today? - if you didn't need to think about others, what would become possible for you? Hope you feel inspired and dare to fly!