WHAT ARE STRENGTHS?

Candidates bring to the labour market evidence which falls under a number of categories:

This material probably already populates your CV and application forms. However, it’s easy to get bogged down in your own history, putting down things that are important to you, rather than vital to an employer. Strengths are pieces of evidence that perform a number of functions:

For example, one strength that is valued in the modern workplace might be described as improvising effectively under pressure. It’s the ability to come up with creative, appropriate and timely solutions, either working against the clock or where there are other kinds of pressure, e.g. quality, sourcing problems, client dissatisfaction or competing deadlines. This strength is a composite of organisational and people skills, experience, creative intelligence, negotiation (and possibly several other skills and qualities). Where have you done something like this?

Any understanding of strengths must build on the important work of Marcus Buckingham (http://www.tmbc.com) who in Now, Discover Your Strengths makes it clear that a strength is not simply something you are good at, and a weakness is not the lack of ability to do something. For Buckingham a strength is ‘an activity that makes you feel strong – it’s an activity that strengthens you’. He points out that we are not accurate judges of our own strengths and weaknesses, but there are clear signs when you are using true strengths, including ‘positive anticipation’ of future activities and an ability to learn and improve skills quickly and enthusiastically.

This philosophy is strongly related to the idea of motivated skills – skills you perform well and which give you energy. You can even be motivated by imagining using them. These are the skills you look forward to using on a Sunday night when you are packing your bag for work. When we use these skills we may experience what psychologists call a sense of flow – an enlivening mix of concentration and fulfilment that makes time seem to move very quickly. (If you’re interested in the idea of motivated skills and flow you might also find it useful to undertake the highly recommended online inventory What Do You Enjoy? published by John Whapham – see www.w3-therapist.co.uk/ques-intro.php.)

Many people assume that listing their strengths in a CV or discussing what they are good at during an interview is as easy as writing a shopping list. It isn’t, because of the filters that get in the way. When you sit down with someone who has just started on the process of career change you often discover that they have a distorted picture of their own skill set.

Distortion could mean a certain kind of blindness (see my thoughts on filters below), often expressed as: ‘I don’t have too many skills’ or ‘My skills aren’t very impressive’. Others do have a shortlist of their own skills, but these are often mixed up with personality attributes, for example ‘I’m a good organiser, I’m a team player, I can think on my feet’, and ‘I’m a self-starter’. These are a good start, but the skills are still abstract labels rather than being rooted in experience. Others give a list of skills which is actually a breakdown of what they need to do in their current job.

SURELY STRENGTHS ARE EASY TO IDENTIFY?

Perhaps the hardest thing about looking for work in a tough market is feeling that everyone else is more employable than you. It’s easy to feel that way when you find yourself up against hundreds of other applicants. Alternatively, you may feel very employable but you’re just not sure how to communicate the things that employers need to hear to have confidence in short-listing you.

An effective job hunt is about looking inwards and outwards, in different phases – inwards so you really understand how you tick, and then outwards to connect your offering with the needs of the workplace. Looking at yourself initially provides some useful data, and a reality check.

‘Strengths can be seen in many ways,’ writes specialist recruiter Pauline Godley. ‘Some people speak about selling or meeting targets as a strength, but equally being a contributing team member is a strength as well as being methodical in your work. Strengths also apply to how people cope under pressure and how they work on their own initiative, so examples in any of these areas will help less confident candidates sell themselves.’

Many people who have an aversion to self-promotion find it difficult to find the right language to describe the things they have done well in the past. Career coach Stuart McIntosh suggests you start by showing your draft CV to colleagues and peers and asking the question ‘What do I do well?’. Obtaining a kind of mini-360 degree review will help you quickly grasp good examples of where you have excelled or significantly added to the job description. McIntosh adds:

Then decide, preferably with the help of a friend, where these strengths are best applied – what job are you looking for and what are the job titles which apply to these roles? (Sometimes this means changing your current job title to what the market calls it rather than what your employer calls it, particularly true in the public sector.) You can find these job titles by looking at Reed, Total Jobs etc. (but look across the UK rather than just locally) and researching what jobs are of interest and what they are called.

TRAWLING YOUR EXPERIENCE

Few people start with skill lists when they write their own CVs. They start with experience, which is complex, sometimes messy, with fuzzy edges rather than clear boundaries between ‘skill’ and ‘knowledge’. We start with stories. What have we achieved? What activities occupied us?

Start with stories that have some sense of an outcome. So, for example, it’s always easier to talk about a task which had a clear beginning, middle and end than it is to talk about something you did over a very long period of time. Start to re-process your career into a series of mini-projects.

Record as many strength-related stories as you can. You can do this in a number of ways. One obvious method is to look in detail at each job you have ever done, working backwards in just the same way that a CV covers more recent jobs first. Another method is to give yourself broad categories (e.g. work, formal learning, personal development, volunteering, hobbies) and see what evidence comes up.

Open a notebook and write down all those skills that come up in the Seven Steps outlined below.

BUILDING ON SKILLS INFORMATION

A presented list of skills is not usually enough to get a job offer. How and where you have used those skills is what matters. Expand on each skill you identify by using the Skill Diamond.

Record your results from both the Seven Steps and the Skill Diamond exercises above in your Experience Databank (see Chapter 6).

TURNING SKILLS INTO STRENGTHS

When people describe their skills they often feel like loose-fitting labels. Candidates say ‘I have excellent written communication skills’. This may be accurate, but sounds stilted, and implies: like everyone else …

Career coach Zena Everett says that candidates:

are too generic about their skills and are vague about their career objectives, saying ‘I can do anything in marketing’ rather than ‘I really understand the 40 something woman and her retail buying patterns so am particularly interested in a role that enables me to use this expertise.’ In this market you are being hired because you can solve particular problems rather than just because you are a generic good all-rounder. Think back to when you were involved in a hiring decision. Did you say ‘let’s get a nice person into the team who has good office skills’ or was it the more specific ‘let’s get someone in who is really good on the phone and will manage the team’s diary for us’? Putting ‘reliable and dependable’ as a skill on your CV doesn’t make you stand out from the crowd.

Skills come alive when you describe them as strengths. In practice, what this means is embedding them in a story which is not about the skill, but about you.

Think about communicating your strengths in two versions: Americano and Espresso.

• The Espresso version is short and punchy. It’s sometimes useful when you are introducing yourself by what you do rather than by a job title. You might use a one-liner in conversation such as: ‘I’ve been told that I write good reports in plain English, and I am really good at explaining complex ideas in straightforward language’, which, translated into a bullet point, is a good CV item.
• In a detailed interview response, give the Americano version – strong but slightly longer, for example: ‘Perhaps a good example of my written communication skills is where I was asked to produce a new promotional leaflet. Everything we had produced in the past had just talked about us and what we did. I decided that clients are far more interested in reading about their own problems, so instead of a leaflet we produced a book about best practice, full of tips and advice as well as a short summary of what we did. The booklet had to be reprinted twice, and we even had a waiting list at one stage.’

Prompts to remembering how you used your strengths in action

An effective CV contains assertions and evidence, and the best kind of evidence of your skills and know-how is contained in defined achievements. Learned as mini-narratives, they are also useful to answer interview questions.

1. Start with supportive friends and colleagues. Ask them to remind you of things you did well, where you have made a difference, and what you are like when you are performing at your best.
2. Go back through your work diaries and logs. Stop and remember projects in detail. What did you actually do? What were you capable of doing at the end that you couldn’t do at the beginning of the project?
3. Look for times when you faced clear problems or obstacles. How did you go about solving the problem? Where did your strategy come from?
4. Look at projects or tasks where there was a clear outcome, where something changed.
5. Where have you learned something very quickly in order to get something done?
6. If you worked as part of a team, concentrate on moments where you did something.
7. Collect tangible evidence of achievement – numbers, percentages, margins and timescales always help, but your evidence might be a letter from a happy customer, an award or a good appraisal.
8. Give equal attention to times when you used ‘soft’ skills, e.g. communicating, engaging, persuading, negotiating, coaching. Talk about what happened as a result of those interventions.
9. Look at the job description for your last job. In what ways did you redefine or enlarge the job?
10. Look for examples of times when you delivered more than people were expecting or went the extra mile to achieve the right result.
11. Look for times when you brought in new ideas or adapted something creatively.
12. Identify moments when you snatched victory from the jaws of failure.

Remember to look at achievements in your non-working life. It’s often here that you find skills that are under-valued or undeveloped.

Careers specialist Malcolm Watt advises you to:

Build the stories which demonstrate strengths, and dig out the achievements within those stories. Remember times when you used these strengths and how you felt: the more you think about them, the clearer they become and the more detail you can add to them. This all helps build self-confidence and helps outweigh the feeling that you are selling something you don’t really believe you have done.

MOVING ON

How do you know when you have done enough to move on from this stage in the job hunt? You will have evidence of your skills and the broader picture, your strengths. You will have the beginnings of stories which will communicate how you used these strengths and what you achieved, rather than just a list of skills that feels disconnected from you.