SERIES 8 COURSES: 10, 18, 26, 27, 28 —Know yourself: Finding your interests and skills Whether you are contemplating a career change or simply want to grow and achieve a more balanced life, it is useful to analyze what you flourish at and what brings you joy to gain valuable insight. This enables you to align your potential and your outlook, so you have the road to ideal success and to real satisfaction.
Before You Commit: Assess Your Interest
Interests are what you love to do instinctively. They are the activities which keep you busy, passionate, and sanguin; egging you to learn a knowledge cocktail. Knowing what these interests are is important, as it will dictate your choices about your career, your pastimes, and your entire way of life. Being aligned with their interest helps individuals feel more satisfied and succeed more in a particular field.
A few ways to assess your interests include:
- Consider Previous Experiences: What were some of the things that you enjoyed doing most in school, at work or in your personal life? What were the common themes? These revelations may help lead to what you’re interested in.
- Discover New Activities: You may find it difficult to know what you like until you try something different. Try other hobbies, volunteer gigs, or side projects to find what lights a fire in you.
- Think about your Currency: What do you read about in your spare time? What topics or conversations have you gravitated toward? You may already know what you want and not realise that your natural curiosity could be a strong indicator.
Assessing Your Skills: The Key to Your Success
Skills are abilities and expertise; they are acquired through education and the experience gained from practice. Skills: Knowing what you can do not only helps you to recognise your strengths but allows you to spot possible weaknesses and areas where you can grow. Your abilities directly correlate to your work success, side hustles, and even in relationships.
Here is what you can do to measure your abilities:
- Counting the skillset: Write down a list of skills you’ve mastered, whether technical (e.g., coding, graphic design) or soft skills (e.g., communication, problem-solving). Group them under leadership, creativity, analytical thinking, teamwork, and so forth.
- Request Feedback: Reach out to colleagues, friends, or mentors for feedback around your strengths. Other people are sometimes able to point out your skills that you might not even realize you have or minimize.
- Assess Your Strengths and Weaknesses: Take inventory of your areas of natural strength and where you may need more development. Knowing what you do well, and what you don’t do well, are skills that help you decide where to work harder to get better, and where to mostly ignore.
- Do Online Assessments: Numerous online tools are available to assess your skills, as well as your interests. Tools such as personality tests, career aptitude tests, and skill assessment platforms can help clarify things.
How Interests and Skills are Connected
Assessing your interests and skills will only be able to take you so far, the true power lies in the two together. Interests define what you love and what you are passionate about while skills demonstrate areas in which you have the ability to perform at a high level. These two factors crossover can point you in the direction of roles, or activities where you are most likely to excel.
For instance, if your interest is in writing or creating content and you have a skill(communication) to back that interest, this can lead you to career options such as content creation, marketing, or journalism. Or, if you like to solve problems (interest) and you are good at data analysis (skill), something like data science or engineering could be a great fit.
Wrap Up: Where to Go from Here
Now that you’ve clarified interests and skills, it’s time to act. If you then followed all of that up with the steps below, you should be able to take advantage of your newfound understanding:
- You have an interest area that you already work on: Set Clear Goals: Having specific goals will keep you focused, whether you are studying for a new career, learning a particular skill set, or at the hobby you’ll enjoy more.
- Use the strengths assessment to create a plan: Name the steps you need to take to leverage your strengths and improve areas where you are weaker; This could be in the shape of taking an added classroom, looking for a mentor or undertaking tasks tied to your emerging interests.
- Explore Career Options: If you’re gauging your interests and skills against a future career change or professional advancement, investigate positions or industries that could be a well-suited fit for your skills. Other ways to get exposure include networking, informational conversations, and internships.
- Learn for LifeLong: Professional, personal and social life assessment is a process that continues all your life. Your interests and skills might change as you grow. Regularly consider your own growth, and remain open to learning new skills in order to drive engagement and remain relevant.
Conclusion
Identifying your interests and skills is not only about knowing what you enjoy doing and what you’re good at, but also finding a way to align those skills with your objectives. That sense of self-awareness is what helps so many people to become more satisfied about their personal growth, career development and happiness. Ultimately, growing your investment in yourself, by assessing what you can make great use of, will empower you to stride along a successful life course. So get started today — your future self will thank you.
