EDUCATION | Driving tomorrow’s achievements
08 December 2008
What You Offer the World
By Richard N. Bolles
Life planning expert Richard N. Bolles, author of What Color Is Your Parachute?, offers some advice on how to identify the skills you have that will lead you to the career you want.
For years, I’ve taught workshops attended by people from around the world – poor, rich, young, old, schooled, and unschooled. I’ve discovered that everyone – and I mean everyone – has at least 500 skills. The questions are: Which kind, and what are they?
We are all born gifted; we are all born “skilled,” even those with severe disabilities. Watch a baby learn, digest, and put information to use. The skills every child has are astounding!
Look at your skills, examine them, and recognize they are talents you offer the world.
Basically there are three kinds of skills, and it is useful to think of them in three categories: verbs, nouns, and adjectives.
Some of your skills are verbs, things you do. Like: healing, sewing, constructing, driving, communicating, persuading, motivating, negotiating, calculating, organizing, planning, memorizing, researching, synthesizing, etc. These are your Transferable or Functional Skills. They are also called talents, gifts, and “natural skills.”
They are strengths you have, often from birth. Some people, for example, are born knowing how to negotiate; but if you weren’t, you often can learn how to do it as you grow. So, some of these skills are “acquired.” You rarely ever lose these skills.
They are called your Transferable Skills because they can be transferred from one occupation to another and used in a variety of fields, no matter how often you change careers.
These skills are things you are good at doing in one of three universes: people, things, or data/information/ideas. Most of us lean toward preferring work that is primarily with either people, things, or data. And why? Because that’s where we use the skills we most love to use.
Some of your skills are nouns, subjects and objects you understand well. Like: computers, English, antiques, flowers, colors, fashion, Microsoft Word, music, farm equipment, data, graphics, Asia, Japanese, the stock market, etc.
These are called your Subject Skills or Knowledge Skills. They are subjects that you know something about and love to use in your work. They are often called “your expertises.”
You have learned these, over the years, through apprenticeships (formal or informal), school, life experience, or books, or from a mentor. Which ones do you absolutely love to use? This is the second set of skills you have to offer the world.
Adjectives or adverbs are the third kind of skills.
Like: accurate, adaptable, creative, dependable, flexible, methodical, persistent, punctual, responsible, self-reliant, tactful, courteous, kind, etc.
These are your Personal Trait Skills. Traits are the ways you manage yourself, the way you discipline yourself. They give a style to your transferable skills. Often these are developed only through experience.
In everyday conversation, we speak of our traits as though they floated freely in the air: “I am dependable; I am creative; I am punctual.” But in reality, traits are always attached to your transferable skills, as adjectives or adverbs.
For example, if your favorite transferable skill is “researching,” then your traits describe or modify how you do your “researching.” Is it methodically, or creatively, or dependably?
These styles, these self-disciplines, are the third thing you have to offer to the world.
How you combine these three kinds of skills is what makes you unique.
It is important, then, that you figure out what kinds of jobs need the transferable skills, and the expertises, and the traits that you most like to use. After all, you were born because the world needs what you uniquely have to offer.
This article is adapted from http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/, the official site of Bolles’s book What Color Is Your Parachute? Reprinted with permission.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
