Skills and Interests

Reposition yourself to re-enter the workforce; join me on my personal branding journey.

Last week I talked about values, strengths and weakness in the career self-assessment process. This week I will cover skills and interests. On my MBTI post I mentioned CISS - Campbell Interest and Skills Survey and Skillscan as tools I have used that you can find online to help you target your interests and skills.

 According to CISS individual profile results report, your vocational interests and skills are important components of your personal characteristics. What you like to do, and what you are confident that you can do, can play an important role in your future careeer satisfaction and success.  The CISS profile analyzes your self-reported interests and your self-reported skills and shows how you compare with people in general and with happily employed people in a variety of occupations.

Your CISS profile is organized into seven Orientation Scales covering important areas of the world of work.

• Influencing
• Organizing
• Helping
• Creating
• Analyzing
• Producing
• Adventuring

I scored highest in Creating  and Influencing Orientations which is in sync with my values.  Recommended occupations to pursue include Advertising/Marketing and International Activities.

Influencers like to make things happen. They are often visible because they tend to take charge of activities that interest them. They typically work in organizations where they are responsible for directing activities, setting policies and motivating people.

From the Skillscan exercise I came up with the following summary of action verbs which describe my skills.

• Communication - motivate, promote, facilitate, consult
• Mental Creative - conceptualize, brainstorm, intuit
• Leadership - initiate, plan, decide, influence

Now that we have a good list of wants, needs, interests and skills under our belt, the next step will be using them to begin defining and setting some goals for ourselves.

See you next Friday...