Identifying Your Skills

When it comes to looking for work and successfully applying for vacancies, a CV is critical in ensuring your success. One of the primary functions of your CV is to identify your skills as well as your strengths, weaknesses, experience and other aspects that a CV will typically address. When trying to make potentially employers aware of your skills, a good CV is critical in identifying them.

A well written CV can make the difference between being successful for a vacancy and being unsuccessful. Baxter Personnel has advice that will enable you to write a higher quality CV and improve your chances of success, you can view Baxter Personnel’s CV tips here as well as five common CV mistakes that you should avoid here. 

Identifying your skills is critical in writing a good CV, identifying your skills can be difficult to do and identifying all of your skills can be difficult if they’re not in use in your current position as skills can often be overlooked. There are numerous ways to identify your skills so that you can then compile them for your CV. Some of the methods for identifying your skills include making a list of your previous vacancies and skills involved as well as your hobbies and skills involved with those.

In order to identify your skills, you will need to first make a list of your previous places of employment and the tasks that you were assigned which can significantly help in determining your skills for your CV. Day to day activities will likely comprise of the majority of your skills list. This can also include volunteer work or other professional experience.

In addition to making a list of your previous jobs and tasks that were involved, making a list of your hobbies can be equally constructive as this will allow you to identify skills that you may be proficient with outside of the workplace. Making a list of your hobbies can significantly expand your skillset and will indicate to a potential employer your interest as well as personality.

Once you have your list of current skills, you can proceed to identifying the vacancies that you would like to apply for and the skills required for these positions. Once you have the list of vacancies and required skills this can be compared to your list of current skills and suitable jobs can be determined.

When determining your skills and listing them, it’s vital to be realistic about your skills and the level that your skills are at. Knowing what your skills are and being able to put them forward to potential employers is critical, it is vitally important however that all of the skills that you mention can be demonstrated.