How do you evaluate your skills for a new job? (2024)

One critical blunder we often make in identifying skills needed for target job is "concentrating solely on the skills listed in the job description."My advice? Don't limit yourself to immediate needs. Instead, analyze emerging trends in your specific field, delve into future industry demands, and develop skills poised for high demand.This way, you open doors to exciting opportunities and become a valuable asset to any organization and highly sought-after for years to come.

Once, in an entrepreneurship challenge, my team got a mentor and I created good rapport with him. We didn't pass to the next round, but I reached out to our mentor, thanked him for his help, updated him on our status, shared that I was looking for a job and asked for a referral. He told me to visit his company. I went in for a chat and came out with a job. The skills he had seen made the difference. I was hired as a product manager when my previous job was as a strategy consultant. He saw the interpersonal skills that were relevant and challenged me to grow the hard skills on the job. To me that showed that transferable skills are a gateway to a wider range of opportunities, so we should groom them to grow in and out of our current carrers.

Self-assessment is a good visual way to show how proficient you are in, say, a language in your CV, but it is not as often trusted by itself. Offering proof such as tests, for language proficiency, and feedback from previous workers as well as LinkedIn Skill endorsem*nt from previous colleagues can make a difference on the believability of what you are exposing. In regards to work experience, Portfolios truly should not be forgotten. As a Product Manager I was so engrossed in my daily work that I forgot to make a record of my achievements. You need permission from your company to share what you build there as a case study, but oftentimes, they will say yes, as it is free publicity. So 📝 everything down. It'll surely help in your future.

This is especially true if you add a previous step of first checking the desired job posts and seeing their requirements, then writting down the most commonly asked skills for it. Then you won't "waste time" developing skills that aren't inrehently needed for that position and can focus on the Compare and Contrast mentioned by LinkedIn in this advice column. Sounds obvious, but the tip, in a nutshell is: Don't guess what they want. Do the research based on actual job posts, write down what you own and what you lack and then put it on a scale. Best of luck to us all!

In this step, don't forget to take into account your learning style. If you trive with hands-on learning, then watching tutorials and use interactive tools. That might be more effective to you than signing up for a passive course where you learn all the theory first, only to act later. If you need the in person connection, then community oriented learning might make more sense to you and online forums can be of help. That applies to all the learning styles out there. If you don't know yours, then think about it, take a test, find it out, and apply it to your learning plan. That will help you to weed out the materials that would not be effective for you. I hope this helps you speed your learning in an effective way. Best, Rafaela Modesto.