Discovering Your Hidden Strengths: The Power of a Skills Audit

You tend to only value skills you do not have. While overlooking skills you have because it is done with ease. When you are asked to talk about your strengths you have no idea what to say.

Think about those certain skills or abilities you possess yet take for granted because it comes naturally to you. Those are your strengths.

The easy hack I found to identify your strengths is by conducting a skills audit. It is essential at every point in your personal development and career journey.

For about four years, I was running a freelance business alongside a full-time job and not once did I pause to reflect on the skills I had acquired along the way. A while ago, I took out the time to finally pause and reflect, and I am better for it because it helped me discover several valuable and marketable skills I possess but had not noticed.

For young professionals navigating the job market in 2023, performing a skills audit is even more pertinent. Especially when we have to market our skills in front of more screens with little or no physical contact.

What is a skills audit?

A skills audit is the process of measuring and assessing your level of expertise across a range of soft and hard skills. When you are aware of what skills are your strengths and the skills you need to develop, you would feel more confident about the value you bring and be able to talk about them.

In this article, I will share different ways you can conduct a skills audit, share my findings from my skills audit as regards my freelance business, and how these skills have helped me in my career so far.

Three Ways to Conduct a Skills Audit

1. Reflect on Your Achievements

Think about your proudest moments at your job, school, or business. Write them all down. Then you can dissect each achievement to figure out what skills you used to make it happen.

For example, if you were able to develop a proposal that won a contract for your firm, this probably involved conducting industry research, analyzing data, collaboration skills, and technical writing skills. You can then evaluate your level of expertise in each skill.

Once you are able to take note of the skills you used to complete your accomplishments, you can think about which aspects you enjoyed the most, as well as the aspects you may have struggled with.

2. Seek Feedback and Input

If you tend to struggle when it comes to identifying your own achievements, then you can leverage others' perspectives to uncover your skills as a starting point.

Firstly, try to remember the aspects of your work that you get positive feedback or commendations from often. Actively listen to what they say and reflect on whether it is true to you or not.

Secondly, ask questions to people who know you well and can tell you about your strengths and weaknesses. It could be your supervisor, line manager, co-worker, friend, mentor, or business partner – they have to be people who would be honest with you as that is the priority in this exercise.

3. Explore Self-Assessment Tools:

When all else fails or you still don’t feel confident with the responses you have received, you can gain clarity through skills evaluation tests. You can find numerous free tests online, I highly recommend the one by 16Personalities.

I have taken it several times over the years and it has always been useful in providing some clarity on what my strengths and weaknesses were.

About My Freelance Business

I am the lead event producer and co-founder of We Just Came 2 Events, an event production company that specializes in curating themed experiences for people to connect.

We created experiences for people to build meaningful connections. Some of the other services we provided were event coordination, event marketing and publicity, rental services, crowd engagement, and interactive brand engagement activities.

P.S. I am referring to it in the past tense because I have taken a break to focus on my graduate degree full-time. I have another freelance business I just started which I would share more on at the end of this article.

Now, here are the skills I discovered after my skills audit:

• Event Management: I was able to apply my project management skills to plan and curate live and virtual events. Since August 2018, we have organized over 60 events, and working in a very small team required us to be organized, detail-oriented, set achievable goals, and work within a budget that still ensures we are able to provide a quality experience for our guests.
• Facilitation and Hosting Skills: For someone who once had stage fright, this is one skill I am particularly proud of. I played the role of the host at almost all our events. This helped me learn how to engage an audience, keep their attention, and interact with diverse audiences.
• Content Design: Having to create most of the content on our social media platforms definitely helped build my graphic design and video editing skills. It also made me discover I enjoy doing it and have an eye for what makes a good design. I am forever grateful that Canva exists, as it makes it easier and faster to create visual content.
• Copywriting: It is one thing to plan an event and another thing to get people interested in attending. I learned how to write persuasive marketing and promotional materials that motivated people to attend our events or take action. I particularly enjoyed email marketing and it is one area I have been learning more on. This is why I have been motivated to start my freelance content writing business.
• Adaptability and Improvisation: This is one of the most difficult skills I had to learn as a perfectionist who likes doing things to the highest standards. However, after organizing numerous events, I came to terms with the reality that things will not always go as planned regardless of how well we may have planned. I learned how to stay calm and ensure our events still ran seamlessly; this has proven to be an invaluable life skill. We once had to change venues about 5 days before the event. This was almost after a month of publicity but it turned out to be the best decision as we were able to provide a better experience for our guests than if we had stuck to the former venue. This made me discover I am able to find solutions quickly, make difficult decisions, and just adapt to whatever situation presents itself.
• Customer and Client Relations: I considered myself an extension of the brand, which meant I had to represent all our values in person. I put my interpersonal and communication skills to work to ensure our guests were comfortable, engaged and relaxed enough to build meaningful connections. Thanks to this, I have made several friends at my events and we never received any negative reviews from our events since we started.
• Collaboration: We partnered or worked for other brands to produce almost all of our events. Here I learned how to actively listen, leverage a partner's strengths, and manage diverse personalities. Being able to collaborate remotely is another asset I acquired. We once planned an event with a partner that we did not meet physically till the actual day of the event and everything went as planned.

How These Skills Helped My Career

Believe it or not, all these skills helped me to excel in my work as a Communications professional. For example, my event management and facilitation skills increased my self-confidence. This made me volunteer and be given opportunities that required using these skills because I knew I could deliver exceptionally well on them.

Balancing a demanding career with an equally demanding freelance business improved my time management skills. I was able to learn how to utilize smart work techniques to increase my productivity.

Lastly, it has also earned me more respect from my colleagues and peers who could not fathom how I was able to balance it all. For some context, I have been told several times that my line of business - event production - is not a “lady-like” thing to be involved in. So it felt great to get to crush those stereotypes along the way and still be great at what I do.

3 Reasons Why You Should Conduct A Skills Audit Today

1. Do it for your self-esteem: By acknowledging what you are good at, you get to feel good about yourself and own those skills that make you unique.

2. You are always interview-ready: With the turbulent job market and economy, you can never be too comfortable at any job. Being aware of your skills and knowing how to talk (read: brag) about them already gives you an edge over other job seekers and positions you for opportunities that you want and would be great at.

3. Your personal development: As human beings, we are dynamic and constantly changing. The same can be said for your skills. What you may have been great at or enjoyed five years ago might not be the same today. Knowing the skills that are your strengths or weaknesses keeps you in tune with your ever-changing interests, passions, and ambitions. The person I was five years ago would never have gone for a Business degree, yet look at me today studying a whole MBA because I realized the gaps in my skill set.

Introducing my new freelance business...

I am a freelance content writer and communications strategist who helps you build authentic connections by telling stories that amplify emotions. I specialize in content for non-profits, SAAS, finance and tech companies. You can visit my website to learn more or follow me here on LinkedIn for more valuable insights and tips on personal development and career growth.

Your journey to discovering and harnessing your strengths starts with a skills audit – take the first step today. If you have ever performed a skills audit, tell me what your process is like, and how it has helped you. Please share this with someone who you know needs it.