Skills Coaching: How to Assess Your Skills

Do you know the value you bring to your team? Or perhaps you feel you can offer more and you have not been able to express the why effectively? Today, I'll show you some techniques to do a self-assessment so you can recognize the strengths of your skills. Let's listen. Hi, and welcome to the Hardcore Soft Skills Podcast. I am Yadi Caro, an organizational psychology practitioner and team coach. And each week, we review new skills with the help of experts you can implement to help you and your team succeed. In the previous episode, I was discussing about the need to connect with others. So as you prepare to take a new project team, join a team, or prep for that job interview, doing a self-assessment helps. We'll remind ourselves of what it is that we can bring to the table. Conducing a self-assessment of our skills and our weaknesses will define which areas we can contribute to more and which areas we may need to seek help from our teammates. First, let's talk about evaluating our hard skills, which quote unquote the technical skills. If you are a job seeker, review the description of the role you want. If you are in an existing role, you can review the statement of work for your team organization and the expected results. If you do not have that, ask your manager about what were the specific skills that they were looking for. If you see things evolving in your organization now, what are those coveted skills they need? Do you have those already? Based on what is described on your job description, which skills do you feel very comfortable with right now? On the other hand, which can use a little polishing? You can do online free self-assessments and check how are you doing, whatever those technical skills are, and these assessments helps us review how can we improve. Evaluating these will help prepare us to identify the type of work we signed on to or which type of work we may need to partner up with an expert teammate, a mentor to help us get caught up. Next up, let's talk about the soft skills, quote unquote soft skills. These are a bit trickier because they might not specifically be captured in your current job description, but there are a few ways to go about assessing them. You can use the assessment checklist I provide here to you, free of cost. Go to the podcast notes and download this list, which includes about 30 different skills where you can determine how well do you consider you are doing on each specific one, like communication, negotiation, teamwork, etc. You can also use other type of assessment tools, which may serve as indicators of the type of soft skills you already have. There are, for example, the CliftonStrengths assessment, which assessors, it assesses areas such as strategic thinking, your level of influence, how do you relate to others. I also recently featured another episode where I had Rich Devini, and we discussed the topic of attributes. Listen to this episode, which I provided here in the show notes, and you will learn more about some of my own attributes and how can you assess your attributes as well. Then be open to honest feedback. Seek out the honest opinion of people you trust. Find a friend, a former co-worker, or even your partner. Compare your own assessment of your skills, either the soft skills or even the technical skills and theirs, to see where the differences may lie. You may think you are good at listening, but perhaps your partner thinks otherwise. You may also discover things you were not thinking about, like your ability to break down complex problems. It seems to come natural to you, perhaps, and you were not even thinking about it, to add it as a strength, yet this is something that other people think you are a master at. So, getting feedback from others will help you realize the areas you have strengths on. There may be areas where you need support also when collaborating with your teammates. Regularly examining your hard and your soft skills will solidify your value to your team. It will improve your work relationships. Your colleagues will know that you are the go-to person for your top skill and recognize your humility as well when a task is outside of your wheelhouse. What other methods do you have to assess your skills? Also, if you want to improve on any skills and need some coaching, contact me. I'd love to hear from you and help you achieve your goals. Thank you for listening and see you next time.