CAREER DIRECTION (con't- 2 of 14)

Understanding Your Strengths

Test Your Skills  

• Find The Resources That Will Help You Most
  • Personal Mastery (Questions 3, 8)
  • Time Management (Questions 1, 4, 6, 15)
  • Communication Skills (Questions 9, 11, 13)
  • Problem Solving and Decision Making (Questions 2, 10, 14)
  • Leadership and Management (Questions 5, 7, 12)

Personal SWOT Analysis

Making the Most of Your Talents and Opportunities  

Strengths

• What advantages do you have that others don't have (for example, skills, certifications, education, or connections)?
• What do you do better than anyone else?
• What personal resources can you access?
• What do other people (and your boss, in particular) see as your strengths?
• Which of your achievements are you most proud of?
• What values do you believe in that others fail to exhibit?
• Are you part of a network that no one else is involved in? If so, what connections do you have with influential people?

Weaknesses

• What tasks do you usually avoid because you don't feel confident doing them?
• What will the people around you see as your weaknesses?
• Are you completely confident in your education and skills training? If not, where are you weakest?
• What are your negative work habits (for example, are you often late, are you disorganized, do you have a short temper, or are you poor at handling stress)?
• Do you have personality traits that hold you back in your field? For instance, if you have to conduct meetings on a regular basis, a fear of public speaking would be a major weakness.

Opportunities

• What new technology can help you? Or can you get help from others or from people via the Internet?
• Is your industry growing? If so, how can you take advantage of the current market?
• Do you have a network of strategic contacts to help you, or offer good advice?
• What trends (management or otherwise) do you see in your company, and how can you take advantage of them?
• Are any of your competitors failing to do something important? If so, can you take advantage of their mistakes?
• Is there a need in your company or industry that no one is filling?
• Do your customers or vendors complain about something in your company? If so, could you create an opportunity by offering a solution?

You might find useful opportunities in the following:

• Networking events, educational classes, or conferences.
• A colleague going on an extended leave. Could you take on some of this person's projects to gain experience?
• A new role or project that forces you to learn new skills, like public speaking or international relations.
• A company expansion or acquisition. Do you have specific skills (like a second language) that could help with the process?
• Also, importantly, look at your strengths, and ask yourself whether these open up any opportunities – and look at your weaknesses, and ask yourself whether you could open up opportunities by eliminating those weaknesses.

Threats

• What obstacles do you currently face at work?
• Are any of your colleagues competing with you for projects or roles?
• Is your job (or the demand for the things you do) changing?
• Does changing technology threaten your position?
• Could any of your weaknesses lead to threats

Strengths Finder

Discovering Your True Potential

• We're not talking about your industry knowledge or your years of experience in your field. We're talking about your real strengths – the strengths that set you apart from your colleagues and make you unique. When was the last time you sat down to analyze these strengths? Or, for that matter, have you ever taken time to analyze what you're truly best at doing?
• Most people haven't. We've all probably analyzed and worked on our weaknesses, but many people don't give their strengths much thought.
• This, however, is a mistake. Working with our strengths is one of the surest paths to success and happiness in what we do. And there's a good chance that we have strengths we've never even considered.

 Personality Types

Checking You're Using Your Natural Talents

• What are employers interested in when they ask you to do a personality test as part of an interview process? Do they want to know if existing team members will get along with you? Are they interested in finding out what motivates you? Or do they hope to uncover how you think and perceive the world?
• All of these things, and more, can be looked at using personality tests. That's what makes personality so fascinating. It's also what makes it such a loaded topic: With so much riding on your personality type, it's easy to try and fit yourself to an "ideal" type.
• One of the most common business uses for personality typing is matching people with job types. But when someone has an idea of the kind of profession he wants to pursue, or the type of person he wants to be, how likely is it that he or she will answer a personality test question without some form of distortion, whether conscious or subconscious?
• If you've taken a personality test like the Myers-Briggs or DISC, how objective were your answers really? If you're like most of us, your answers were probably tainted, just a bit, with how you want to act, think, behave, or react, instead of purely how you do respond. It's nothing to be ashamed of; it's just human nature to want to project a desirable image. Unfortunately, this can lead to a poor match between person and job.

Your Reflected Best Self  

• Getting a Deeper Understanding of Your Strengths

The chances are that the criticisms are most memorable. And what this means is that, at best, you're working on your improving your weaknesses, and you're ignoring your strengths.

• Why Strengths Matter
  • Of course, managers clearly need to point out areas of team members' performance which are not up to standard, if that area is an essential part of the job. But there are two good reasons why ignoring people's strengths can fail to yield the results that managers want. For instance, increased performance.
  • First, focusing on weaknesses often doesn't encourage people to work on those weaknesses: negative feedback generally puts us on the defensive. And, for many, it's natural to deny that the observations are true, or to dismiss them as irrelevant, by telling themselves that that aspect of their work isn't important anyway. Either way, they're not motivated to do much about it.

Next Week……….

1. Enhancing Your Job
2. Effective Working Relationships
3. General Career Skills
4. Getting Ahead
5. Getting a New Role
6. Key Career Points
7. Mentoring and Coaching
8. Finance for Non-Specialists
9. Understanding Different Sectors
10. Understanding Culture
11. Dealing with Challenges
12. Dealing with Difficult People