Know Yourself for Career Success

29 April 2016

In a previous article I spoke about the importance of engaging in a regular process of career maintenance and recommended that the first step in giving your career a check up was to spend some time knowing yourself.  Two things become harder for career development when you don’t know yourself well:

1.     It is harder to decide your next steps

2.     It is harder to sell yourself in a competitive situation (e.g. job interview)

Choosing your next steps

The world of work and career is abundant and opportunities come along all the time (a lot of the time we don’t notice them because we are not looking) and the more your know yourself the more you are able to determine if the opportunity is one that will be a good fit for you.

People often make decisions about their next career steps on an intuitive basis.  Intuition is a valid and surprisingly strong way to make career decisions, and becomes even stronger when you combine it with a data collection process which I will talk about in a future article.  Intuition though is informed by self-knowledge and is more powerful the more background information you have explored about yourself.

Sell Yourself to a New Employer

When you do choose a new opportunity to move towards in your career– perhaps a new job, or new study, or volunteer work, or a new project – you will often face a selection process where you are competing with other people.  In a selection process you have a product to sell and that product is you.  The more you know about the product the more you are able to sell the features of the product to the buyer (i.e. the employer).  With greater self-knowledge you make better linkages between what you have and what the employer is in need of.  In addition, self-knowledge increases the words and concepts you know and can use in the job sales process (you have more words to describe yourself). 

Without knowledge of yourself you can also fall into the trap of selling yourself to an employer to do tasks and use skills that you actually no longer want to develop or that will not support the future development of your career.  For example self knowledge and exploration might expose that although you are good at empathising with and support others you actually don’t enjoy doing it and it drains you, so having an employer buy you for your people skills – as opposed to your analytical skills – can see you sitting in a role that doesn’t fully nourish you.

What do you need to know about yourself?

Here is a checklist of things to explore and develop your self-knowledge around:

·       Your skills – what you can do

·       Your attributes – how you go about doing what you do (sometimes called your qualities)

·       Your strengths – those things you do better than other things, and often enjoy doing more

·       Your areas of knowledge – topics you know about and the level to which you know them

·       Your capabilities – how you can uniquely combine your skills, strengths, knowledge and attributes to do things

·       Your potential – what you will be able to, and want to, do in the future

·       Things you enjoy doing – and might want to do more of

·       Things you are curious about – and will be motivated by

·       Things you care about – these give you meaning and purpose

·       Your mindset around learning – do you believe your abilities are fixed or 'grow-able'

·       Your way of working – so you can optimise the conditions you (and potentially your manager) create for yourself

·       What you find challenging – because a bit of challenge is good, but you don’t want to be overwhelmed 

·       Your personality – or at least some hints around your personal preferences in certain situations

·       Your values – so you make sure your career decisions are in alignment with them

·       What you believe – and if the beliefs you hold are helpful or unhelpful

·       Your life stage – and what new stages you want to explore

·       Your commitments/responsibilities – and the level of commitment you have to them

·       Your reputation – what others say and perceive about you 

A simple Google search is often all that is needed to unearth a whole bunch of resources for helping with this self exploration.  Below are some quality (research backed) free online resources that I often link clients to and if you struggle to find what you are looking for drop me an email for some pointers.

·       Identify your signature strengths

·       Understand the mindset you operate from

·       Get an insight into your personality

·       Assess your level of positivity 

·       Assess your giving behaviour

·       How much are you an original thinker

It does take effort, and reflection time, to establish this base knowledge, but it is worth it.  Once this knowledge is established regular career maintenance will keep you on top of knowing about your ultimate career product – YOU.