Self-awareness

Know yourself and what you have to offer

An essential part of career planning is assessing your skills, abilities and personality.

It is essential for you to understand what you have to offer a future employer, course provider or business associate. You should also understand how you can apply and develop generic and transferable skills and abilities through a range of opportunities.

Graduate recruiters in particular value skills that have been developed through a variety of different experiences including academic and extra-curricular activities. They also expect you to provide evidence of how these skills have been developed.

Benefits of self-awareness

Self-awarness will:

Build a profile of yourself that you can use to match against different career opportunities.
Identify where you may have skills gaps that could be filled.
Help you to understand what you have to offer. This is essential for self-promotion if you are to market yourself effectively and confidently and explain what skills, experience and personal attributes that you have.
You also need to be able to explain how your skills apply to future opportunities e.g. a job, a course or business opportunity.

How to conduct self-awareness

Think about your course, work experience including voluntary work, extra curricular activities and achievements and create a detailed document outlining your skills and experience.

Think about:

Work experience and voluntary work - What did you do? Break it down into specific tasks and experiences, what skills did you develop / use? Use the STAR (S= Situation, T = Task, A = Action you took, R = Result) model to help you create detailed accounts of your experiences. Further advice and examples on using the STAR model is available in the Interviews booklet PDF (208 KB) page 6. This detail will be invaluable when you are creating CVs / applications and when preparing for interviews.
Extra - curricular activities - Projects, sporting activities, societies, member of professional bodies, do you write a blog that is professional (i.e. not one aimed at your friends).
Academic related knowledge and skills - What modules have you studied? Any practical experience such as lab work? Have you been involved in group / project work - if so what was your role? Dissertation / large projects involving research and practical tasks. What skills and knowledge have you gained so far?
Motivation - What interests do you have, what are your values in terms of what is important to you?
Personality - What type of character do you have and what kind of environment do you think would suit you?
Practical considerations - That you may need to consider including salary, location, working hours.