I think that everybody should know how to asses themselves accurately. Learning how to describe yourself and the skills you possess will prove a tremendous advantage in your carrier in the long run. For example if you are capable of doing a certain task but you underrate yourself and when you get asked to do it you say you’re not sure you can do it, than I can assure you that another person that maybe is less qualified but who knows exactly what he can do will get that job. So describing yourself accurately is one of the first things you need to do when you are establishing your carrier goals and where you want to get in life. The paragraphs below are meant to give you a helping hand, with some examples of how you can more accurately describe yourself.

1.      Write down every skill you think you possess. The first step in learning how to describe yourself is to put down on paper everything you think you are capable of. It is important at this stage to put everything you can think of and everything you believe even in the slightest you can do on paper. Do not think that I’m not sure I can do that. Just put down anything that comes into your head no matter if you had any sort of training or not in that field.

2.      Underline the skills that you have certification for. In any resume the skills that you can prove you obtained thru studying and got a certification for are the most important. Put these skills in a table in the first column.

3.      Mark from your first list the skills that you had any sort of experience in implementing. And I do mean any sort of experience. For example, you can put down that you think you have leadership skills. If you were captain of your high-school basketball team, that counts or if you were the leader of a team in workshop that only lasted for to days, that will do as well. If you had any sort of experience practicing these skills put them in the second column of your table.

4.      Mark the skills you have no qualification for, you have never practiced, but you think you may have a knack for. So al the skills that remain in the first list should fit the above criteria, and they should go in the third column. But before you put them in the column you should make a little selection through which you should eliminate all the skills that are unfeasible or improbable to gain in your lifetime, like, for example, becoming an astronaut. I don’t mean that it is impossible to be an astronaut, but it is counterproductive for this exercise of learning how to describe yourself better.

5.      Try to asses pragmatically what is the level you are currently at, at each of the skills in the first and second column. By this I mean what are the real numbers, what can you actually achieve, not what you think you can achieve. For example, let’s say you put in as one of your skills translation from English to French. You may think that on a good day you can translate about 10 pages per hour, but this is just your perception. You should make a small test for each skill and see what your average level is. For example try to translate as much as you can in a day when you feel great, and than compare that to how many pages you can translate in an hour when you feel like you can’t get anything done. Make an average, and that should be your objective skill level. OF course it is better when applying for a job to declare that your skill level is something like 5% under the average you have made because it is much more important to do what you say you will do in the time you say you will do it than saying you will do much more and not being able to do it.

6.      Ask for a second opinion. Ask people who know you and who have seen you using that skill what sort of impression did you leave on them, and compare it to the skill level you have declared. Letting someone from the outside put in their two cents might prove very useful.

7.      For the skills in the last column you should really try to take a course or a professional assessment of your talent in order to see which skills are worth while trying to get or to improve. This will prove valuable in learning how to describe yourself.

Learning how to describe yourself is no easy task, but I believe it is something essential to anybody who is trying to get somewhere in his carrier and not only. All you really need to do is to have a system for rigorously and objectively describing what your skills are. You can either use the system I have mentioned in the paragraphs above, or you can find another that might better suite you.  

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