S = Skills

What can I do?

What skills are in demand?

How can I identify my skills?

Skills are an important factor in career planning because they are what you do and what the employer pays you to do. Learning about the types of skills needed to be successful in an occupation will help you create action plans to develop needed skills.

Skills are what you do in the classroom, on the job and at home. Some skills are fun to do and come naturally, other skills are less natural. Many skills can be developed through instruction and practice. You develop and use transferable skills while attending college. Can you think of skills you need when you: are in the classroom, interact with your peers, study for an exam, lead a study group, participate in clubs and organizations, or complete an internship?

You can also use skills assessments such as the SkillScan and the "Skills Assessment" on Focus to see how your skills transfer to the world of work.

Categorizing Skills

There are three groups of skills.

SELF-MANAGEMENT Skills

These skills may also be referred to as character traits. They explain how you do things rather than what you do. Examples include:

• Has lots of energy
• Gives attention to details
• Gets along well with people

CONTENT or TECHNICAL Skills

These skills relate directly to a particular subject matter, major, job category, procedure, or language and can be mental or physical. Examples include:

• Mental: Identifying the names of the parts of the human body, knowing chemical terms or legal codes, writing or speaking a second language
• Physical: These types of skills are focused toward a specific task or job, able to give a car a tune-up, paint, sew, weld, dunk a basketball

TRANSFERABLE or PROCESS or FUNCTIONAL Skills

These are skills you have been developing over your life that you function. They are called “transferable” because they are used across academic disciplines and job settings. They tend to accumulate and become more sophisticated over time. Examples include:

• Writing: Your ability to “write” complex sentences has grown since you first learned to write in elementary school.
• Leadership: Your ability to manage a group of people to accomplish a project may not be fully developed because you have not had much experience.

Employers typically prefer hiring new employees with strong functional skills because the person has already demonstrated that they “know how to learn”. The employer will tend to have confidence that the applicant will be able to learn specific jobs skills later. This helps explain why people with different college degrees can be found doing the same job.

Skills Identification

Here are three suggestions for identifying your skills:

• Write a story about something you have accomplished in the last few years that you feel great about. In your story, describe all the steps required to accomplish your goal and all the actions (verbs) you did to complete the goal. The action verbs in your story are some of your motivated skills. Repeat this activity until you begin to feel you have identified your self-management, content, and transferable skills.
• Complete a SkillScan Professional Pack Card Sort assessment in Career Services.
• Look at the skills sections of career planning resource books and list those that you have. There are several useful lists found in books in the Career Café Library.
  

Skills in Demand

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