What added value do you offer your employer in return for your salary and benefits?
What are you qualified to do right now? By this I don’t just mean your degree or professional qualifications but your knowledge, skills and experience. What are you the ‘go-to’ person for?
Your skills are your most valuable assets and too often, we only think about our technical skills, as they tend to be easier to identify. These are important; but employers want a person who can approach the task and interact with others too. Having a clear understanding of your skills will help you to identify your added value.
Whilst there are a number of self-assessment tests on the market that allow you to analyse your own personal strengths and weaknesses, I would recommend that you explore your technical, personal and transferable skills with your boss and peers at work. You might be surprised by their response as to how and why you add value within the workplace.
What are Transferable Skills?
These are the skills you possess which can be easily applied and made use of in a number of different situations, allowing you to apply them to a new job opportunity. Transferable skills are the skills that employers look for when they are interviewing you so it’s essential for you to reflect on these and to be able to develop them, add to them and speak about them confidently at job interviews.
Everyone has transferable skills that are developed throughout a person’s life from starting school through to college and university, personal and professional experiences and life in general. Once you have identified your essential skills you can then take them with you and apply in any situation, you can also build on these skills by further experience.
Your transferable skills are what make you marketable and they will provide you with an advantage over your competition. They are essential to your career success and will ease your transition into a new role.
Once you’ve identified your transferable skills then it’s important for you to provide real life examples to support these, in other words what ate your ‘Key Achievements’ to date? I will discuss these in my next Career Blog. In the meantime…
“The more options you can offer in terms of skills, knowledge and experience, the higher the probability of being in demand”