Know What Makes You Valuable and Marketable: How to Identify Your Strengths and Transferable Skills

Your job search success rests in part on your ability to clearly recognize and articulate your value proposition—i.e. your strengths, skills, and positive personal qualities, and how these provide value to an employer.

Knowing clearly the value you would provide to an employer brings you confidence which others pick up on, helping you in job interviews and networking conversations.

Identifying strengths, skills, and positive personal qualities isn’t just for people involved in a job search, though.

You would be wise to do this before you have to search for a new job.

Here are four tips for identifying what specifically you have to offer an employer.

1.   Rework Your Resume With An Eye On Results

Recruiters, HR professionals and hiring managers are not impressed by a resume that consists of nothing more than previous job descriptions.

They care about the results you’ve delivered.

Therefore, your resume needs to be results-focused as much as possible.

Ask yourself “What was the RESULT of this responsibility?” for each bullet point in your resume.

This doesn’t just make for a more compelling resume for someone else to read, it also helps YOU recognize more clearly the value you’ve provided throughout your career.

One of the most heart-warming aspects of doing career coaching is seeing a client grow in confidence and enthusiasm about their abilities when we start to rework their resume to identify the results—and therefore the value—they’ve delivered.

To take this process to the next level for each of your results, ask yourself “What skills, knowledge, and personal attributes of mine made this possible?”

Then notice the common themes that emerge.

For instance, you might notice that a number of valuable results came from your ability to communicate hard-to-hear information in a compassionate and compelling way.

That’s an important skill to have and one you want to communicate when networking and in interviews.

So, use your resume upgrade to get clearer on your strongest skills, strengths, and personal attributes.

2.   Do the Seven Stories Exercise from the book What Color is Your Parachute

This exercise is especially useful if you are exploring a career change.

Even if you aren’t, it helps you identify the specific situations in your career and volunteer life where you: A) excelled at what you were doing, and B) loved doing it.

This intersection between excellence and passion is “where the gold lies” when it comes to identifying your strongest transferable skills…skills that you can apply to jobs and professions other than the one you’re currently in, or have just left.

This exercise is a powerful way to identify your strongest skills—whether you are changing careers or not.

I highly recommend finding the book and doing all the self-assessment exercises.

 3.   Use These Two Self Assessments

At Heart at Work, we’re big fans of the CliftonStrengths Assessment and the Myers Briggs Type Indicator - MBTI (for an online abridged version go to Truity.com). The first is an online assessment that identifies your top five strengths and what people with each strength excel at, as well as the value they bring to the workplace.

Knowing this helps you get clearer on what you have to offer, and guides your decision-making on whether a particular job or career would be a good fit for you.

The MBTI is a personality assessment that offers useful clues about the types of work, workplaces, and careers that tend to fit your personality.

While there are many different assessment tools available, we recommend these two.

4.   Ask for Feedback From People Who Know You Well

One of the most common challenges people have during their job search is recognizing their unique talents.

Most people take for granted the things that come easily to them, the tasks that they do well with minimal effort. Because they are naturally good at something, they assume that is true for others as well.

The fact that a task comes naturally and easily means you’ve come upon a talent, or a strength that differentiates you from others, and is part of your unique value proposition.

So how do you identify your unique talents?

A simple, powerful way is to ask people who know you well, because others can often see in us attributes and abilities that we cannot.

To begin this exercise, email 5-7 people the following four questions, along with an explanation about why you are asking them.

The first three questions come directly from my friend and colleague Susanna Liller, author of You Are a Heroine: A Retelling of the Heroine’s Journey. The fourth is a slight modification of one that she uses when helping people create what she calls their Best Self Vision:

• When have you seen me at my best, and why was that my best?
• What do you think my unique gifts are, both professional and personal and when specifically have you seen me demonstrate them?
• What do you see in me that you think I might not see in myself?
• Is there anything else you want me to know that might help me recognize what I have to offer to a prospective employer?

 These questions are especially helpful in recognizing your personal attributes that are most striking and beneficial. They also give you helpful insight into other strengths that you may have taken for granted.

Doing this exercise provides you with useful information and can build your self-confidence.

It is also a very affirming process because being seen is a fundamental human need, and yet people rarely share all the good they see in others.

I encourage you to review the feedback you’ve received every now and then, especially if you find yourself questioning what you have to offer.

The process of identifying and believing in your strengths and professional value not only boosts your self-confidence, it also helps you make wiser job and career choices.

It also helps keep you from selling yourself short. 

Once you are clear on your strongest skills, strengths, and personal attributes, the next step is being able to communicate them clearly and in a compelling way.

For a more in-depth look at this topic, go to the Videos page at the Heart at Work website, and watch the conversation I had with Barbara Babkirk on this topic.