Describing your skills can feel like an ill-fitting label. What does “excellent communication skills” really mean? Job candidates are often too vague and generic regarding their skills. You are being hired because you can solve particular problems; not because you are a generic Jill or Jack of all trades.
Skills come alive when you describe them as strengths. This means implanting them in a story that is not about the skill but about you.
The best resume contains assertions and evidence, and the best kind of evidence of your skills is contained in defined achievements. As mini-narratives, they are also useful to answer interview questions.
Here are 10 tips to remembering how you used your strengths in action.
- 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.
- Collect tangible evidence of achievements – numbers, percentages, margins and timescales help, but your evidence might also be an email or letter from a happy customer, coworker, or boss.
- Look for times when you faced problems or obstacles. How did you go about solving the problems? What were your strategies, actions, and the end results?
- Look at the job description for your last job. In what ways did you redefine or expand that job?
- Think back on times when you delivered more than people were expecting, or went the extra mile to achieve the optimum result.
- Look at projects or tasks where there was a clear outcome, or where something changed.
- Review all documentation of your past work. Think about the 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?
- Where have you learned something very quickly in order to get something accomplished?
- Think about times when you brought in new ideas or adapted something creatively.
- Identify moments when you snatched victory from the jaws of failure.
Build stories that demonstrate your 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 more clearly you can articulate them orally and in writing. You will then be selling something you believe in – you! Not an obscure skill that doesn’t impress.
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