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7.4 What Is a Skill Set, and How Do I Get One?

Hard Skills Versus Soft Skills

• mySkills myFuture: http://www.myskillsmyfuture.org/Target.aspx
Employers often look for two different types of skill sets in potential employees: hard skills This free service for career exploration sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor,
and soft skills. Hard skills are abilities or skill sets that a person can learn or be trained to Employment and Training allows you to enter jobs you have had and find careers that
obtain. The skills include those acquired when you obtained a degree or certificate in a spe- use similar skills. You can also select from an extensive list of careers for a description
cific academic field, proficiency in a foreign language, or specific computer skills. These skills and detailed information about the career field, job duties, wages, and necessary skills.
are fairly easy to recognize and would be ones you might list on your résumé. • SCSEP Virtual Career Network (VCN) and Senior Community Service Employment
Program Checklist: https://www.vcn.org/backtowork50plus/checklist
Soft skills are more difficult to recognize. They are traits and behaviors based on the strengths This online resource, developed through a partnership among the AARP Foundation,
you possess and your unique personality characteristics. You may be able to develop some the U.S. Department of Labor, and the American Association of Community Colleges,
basic competence in these areas through education or training, but without a natural gift for is not just for retired persons. It is available to everyone and can help you match your
work interests and existing skills to new occupations in today’s job market. You must
them, these soft skills will most likely not be among your strongest abilities. Though they may
create a free VCN account to use the service, but your account is secure and only
or may not be fully realized now, soft skills are natural aptitudes or abilities a person pos-
accessible by you. Your data will not be accessed or shared with others without your
sesses that have the potential to be developed further. Examples of soft skills include athletic
permission.
ability, people skills (the ability to relate to and to interact comfortably with other people),
teamwork skills, the ability to persuade and motivate others, time management, patience, Complete both the Interest and Skills questionnaires to help determine which
careers you might want to explore based on your past education, training, and work
flexibility, and other similar aptitudes.
experience. The complete checklist takes approximately 60 minutes to complete. Then
use the job tools included to identify the types of jobs you may be best suited for based
A Closer Look: Conducting Your Personal Skill Set Inventory will help you get started on deter-
on your skill set, work interests, and personality. Once you have an account, you can
mining your skill set and finding a career match.
access this system 24/7 from any computer.
Reflection Questions
A Closer Look: Conducting Your Personal Skill Set Inventory 1. What were the most interesting things you learned about yourself from the listed
resources?
2. Did these tools give you any new ideas for possible career fields or educational goals? If
Use the self-assessments you conducted earlier in this module and the additional resources
so, what were they?
provided here to construct a personal skills set inventory that describes your unique traits,
3. What next steps will you take to further explore potential career fields or your
talents, and skills. Aim for a list of 8 to 10 of your strongest skills. Don’t forget to ask friends and
educational goals?
family to give their opinions of your skill set. Sometimes others see us more clearly than we see
4. Are there skills you know you will need for your future career that you do not possess?
ourselves. The following are some online resources to help you with your inventory.
If yes, how do you plan to obtain these skills?
• Skills assessment: http://www.careeronestop.org/ExploreCareers/Assessments/
skills.aspx
This self-assessment offered by CareerOneStop provides a Skills Profiler where you can
create a list of your skills and match them to job types that use those skills. It covers
both hard/technical skills and soft skills and allows you to browse various job types.
The site also includes mySkills myFuture, discussed elsewhere in this module. Using Your Skill Set in Today’s Workplace
• What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career- In the 1980s most organizations were defined as a hierarchy, a system in which people’s
Changers: Book
Forty-five years ago, author Richard N. Bolles wrote a book titled What Color Is Your status or importance in the organization was determined by their rank, job title, or position.
A person’s career usually involved climbing a ladder up the ranks of an organization, which
Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers. Since 1975 the
was organized like a pyramid, as shown in Figure 7.5. If you performed well, once you learned
book has been revised every year, and it has sold more than 10 million copies over its
years of publication. The book provides numerous exercises to help you determine a particular job, you were promoted to supervise others who performed that job. Then you
your personal skill set, job-hunting advice, and information on choosing or changing a tried to climb to the next position on the pyramid, where you managed those supervisors, and
career and conducting a job interview. You can easily find new and used copies of the then progressed up the organizational ladder until you reached the highest level you could. Of
book at your local library, online retailers, and both new and used book stores. course, few people reached the top of the ladder, but the only way to succeed was to continue
to move up to increasing levels of responsibility. Seniority—the length of time you spent at

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