Self Assessment

Understanding yourself
Increasing your self awareness and self knowledge will greatly improve your employability. After all, if you know what you are about, you will find it much easier to describe yourself to employers both in writing and verbally. Understanding yourself will also help you to plan your future study, your working life and your personal life better.

Self assessment will help you to:

• Identify your achievements, skills and things that will help you suceed.
• Find out about your personal qualities including strengths and weaknesses.
• Record your achievements to keep track of your successes.

Think about yourself
Think about things you have achieved and skills you have learned. Don't forget to include things from your personal and social life. Where do you think you are starting from? Answer each question in the list below. Can you see a pattern?

• What are your main achievements to date?
• What has motivated you to do particular things?
• How have you sustained motivation when the going gets tough?
• What factors have made a difference to how you feel about your work?
• What qualities have you displayed when working with people?
• When have you shown leadership qualities?
• When have you been...
• co-operative?
• friendly?
• trustworthy?
• assertive?
• calm?
• competitive?

How you meet challenges
Try to write down three things which you found challenging and where you've succeeded. Specify what was difficult about them for you, and how you overcame the difficulties.

Other people's perspectives
Asking other people to tell you what they think about you can be revealing, but also embarassing, for you and them. Avoid this by concentrating on specific qualities rather than generalities.

How other people would describe me
This is an activity you might do on your own or with a friend.

• How would your close friends or family describe your personality?
• Be honest! What would they pick out as your best qualities or strengths?
• When you've thought about this, make a note of what you think they'd say about you.
• If you doing this with a friend, swap notes and see what you think of their answer!

Strengths and weaknesses
Thinking about my strengths and current weaknesses.

Strengths are the things you are good at, what is best about you as a person.

Current weaknesses are things you probably need to work on.

Being honest about your strong and weak points will help you to:

• get better at the things you do.
• make better decisions about how to improve.
• make better working and personal relationships with others.

How does all this help me?
It will help you to understand why you are good at some things and not so good at others. You need to keep you strong points in mind when deciding what sorts of jobs to look for - it's important that you are realistic and choose something you will enjoy and which will match your interests and strengths.

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