By Fabienne Gardoni, employment counselor, Centre des femmes de Montréal
Would you like to be able to quickly adapt your CV to the context of different job offers? Perhaps you want to learn how to emphasize your strengths in a job interview, or change careers without having to start from zero. If any of these situations apply to you, you should consider undergoing a skills assessment!
Here are five good reasons to do a skills assessment.
- Get to know yourself better
During your assessment period, you’ll have the chance to discover more about yourself: your interests, values, needs and personality will all be under the microscope.
You will also have the opportunity to do an inventory of your technical skills, your qualities and aptitudes.
What you learn during your assessment will help you to focus your efforts to find a job that you will find satisfying. Recently, a client who had just completed a job interview told me “For the first time I was happy during a job interview and I expressed my needs clearly to the recruiter, whereas before I only responded to conform to what I believed recruiters wanted to hear.”
- Change careers
Many clients have asked for my help because they want to change careers. They know what they don’t want to do, but have no idea what they do want to do, nor what they could do. If you’re in a similar situation, it’s time for a skills assessment. It will allow you to truly evaluate your experiences, skills and qualities, something that we rarely do. This re-evaluation of your experiences will help you to make links between what you’ve done and what you want to do, identify the common thread of your career path, and ultimately allow you to envision your future.
The assessment can also prompt you to finish old projects that you put on ice in the past because it just wasn’t the right time back then.
Thanks to a skills assessment, my client Erica realized that she still liked her job and, rather than leave the sector entirely, she just needed to look for positions that would allow her to use all of her competencies at once, rather than just one, as her position at the time did.
Sometimes, transferring your skills from one position to another isn’t so easy and you may need to take some additional training. In these cases, at least you’ll have perspective on where you are and what you need to do to get where you want to be.
- Adapting your toolkit
The part of the assessment that focuses on specific skills is like a “BIG CV.” This will allow you to quickly adapt your service offer according to each job posting.
You will become more authentic during interviews and will be able to back up your claims with proof, thanks to the concrete examples identified through your assessment. What do you think? To the question of “Are you a team player?” is the best response “Yes, I enjoy working as part of a team and everyone appreciates me,” OR “I place a lot of value on teamwork and regularly am involved in projects. I was part of the Green Committee that I started, in which I led a team of four people and established an action plan for management. My colleagues believed in me and knew that I was the right person to relay our ideas to the C-suite.”
Do you want to express your strengths in such a way? A skills assessment can help you do just that!
- Gaining confidence and taking action
Some clients of mine have trouble putting plans into action because they lack belief in their own skills. Having an atypical profile, a difficult ending to their most recent job, multiple setbacks or spending a long time away from the job market can have a deleterious effect on one’s confidence.
In cases like these, a skills assessment can be very helpful because it clarifies the candidate’s strengths and achievements, which can in turn foster the person’s confidence and get them back on track.
When I’m working on a skills assessment and I ask my clients to tell me about what they’ve achieved, the majority tell me that they don’t have any – that they’ve never done anything interesting! Even women who interrupted their careers to start a family often have the mistaken impression that they’ve “accomplished nothing” during the years they were not working a job. This is totally false!
When doing the assessment, the whole focus of the exercise is to show the value of the person’s skills. A stay-at-home mom who runs the entire household, plans activities for their kids and maybe their own volunteer work, or a person who is taking care of an aging parent, have developed numerous skills that are valued by employers and can be transitioned to a job.
- Finding a job
The objective of a skills assessment is to help you reach your goals. With a clear portrait of yourself in relation to the job market, useful tools and plenty of preparation before job interviews, you can stand out from the crowd.
Daniel Poulin, orientation counselor and lecturer at UQAM, spent his entire career developing this tool. Thanks to his work at the local employment center in Terrebonne, he helped 80% of his clients find jobs!
What about you – are you ready to make a difference?
References:
« Bilan de compétences et projet professionnel. Des indissociables! » Daniel Poulin c.o.
« Le bilan de compétences. Regards croisés entre la théorie et la pratique. » Guylaine Michaud, Patricia Dionne, Ginette Beaulieu.
Leave a Reply