Importance of Assessing Your Skills

This module is designed to help identify both technical and transferable skills that you may already have but did not realize were valuable to a future employer/grad program, and to make you aware of the many practical/relevant opportunities where you may go to acquire these skills.

As you’ve worked through this module, you've probably begun making mental notes of your skills, but let’s actually take a minute to assess and itemize exactly which skills you already have so that you can determine the areas you may want to further develop. This will strengthen your confidence, as well as reduce your exploration time. You can then pin-point exactly which skill-building opportunities you need to experience in order to build your "tool belt." Then, you'll be ready to add your skill descriptions to your resume.

In this lesson, we will examine tools that will help you assess your current skills, and then show you how to best present your skills to your future employers. Specifically, you will learn how to:

  • Use a technical skills assessment tool, often used by employers, to help quickly identify your technical skills' strengths and weaknesses.
  • Use a transferable skills assessment tool to focus on identifying transferable skills that you may already have, but were unaware of, as well as isolate those areas where you need to strengthen your transferable skills.
  • Integrate both technical and transferable skills into you resume using succinct and descriptive language so that it professionally highlights your acquired skills to future employers.

Now, let's move into our skill assessments!