What Are Your Most Important Skills?

Which Do You Show On Your Resume or CV?

CareerPlanner.com Newsletter
(Issue 2012-4 August 2012)

 

Have you ever wondered what skills to show on your résumé to get maximum impact?

Have you ever wondered what your most important skills are?

How To Identify Your Skills in ~ 15 Minutes or Less

Knowing the skills that you're good at, and that you really enjoy using is critical to your long term job satisfaction and success.

It's hard to be successful and happy when you spend the day using skills you're burned out on, or using skills you aren't good at. In fact that is the ticket to a miserable job. Trust me, I had a job like that once and it didn't go well. It wasn't a good fit.

For several years I've been looking for a good tool to help people quickly and easily understand their own skills. I finally found it.

It's an easy to use, online tool called the Knowdell Motivated Skills Card Sort where you can identify your skills and figure out which are the most important to you.

Once you know that, you will know which skills to build your career around, and which skills to put on your résumé and CV. You will also know what skills to avoid.

So let me tell you a true story about how this new product came to be.

It all Started at a Birthday Party

Back in March 2012, I was lucky enough to be invited to a birthday party for Richard Bolles, the world famous author of "What Color Is Your Parachute 2012." In case you haven't heard me talk about him, Richard Bolles is considered the god father of career coaching and he is one of my personal heroes. His book, which helps you figure out what you want to do for a living, has been completely updated and re-published almost every year since it first came out. The 2012 version is the 40th edition and is a best seller.

Even more amazing than his book is the man himself. Richard Bolles has degrees from Harvard and MIT. He has one of the highest IQ's in the US. But what I like about him the best is that he is a really caring person with a big heart. When Richard Bolles walks into a room and smiles, the whole room lights up.

So while standing in his kitchen at his birthday party, I met a gentlemen named Richard Knowdell. He first tells me he runs a company called Career Research and Testing.

My eyes light up because career testing is what we do at CareerPlanner.com. I was so excited to finally meet someone who enjoys the same type of work as I do.

Then he gets my attention by telling me he was once a high school drop out, but now has a Masters in Psychology. He tells me that he has trained career coaches in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as training career coaches on American military bases. He trains the coaches and counselors who help returning soldiers transition to civilian careers. Pretty cool I think.

I start to ask Richard Knowdell about his products and services. He tells me that one of his most popular career tools is the Knowdell Motivated Skills Card Sort. It's an actual deck of playing cards that have different skills written on one side. You basically lay these cards out on a table and sort them into various stacks, according to the directions he provides. When you are done, you know all about your skills.

He developed this tool over 35 years ago while doing career consulting for Lawrence Livermore Labs, one of the top research facilities in the US. He's kept it updated and current. There's nothing I like more than a product that's been proven over many years, and had been kept up to date.

A few weeks after the party, I attended one of Richard Knowdell's three day career coach training and certification sessions in San Jose, CA. It was there I first saw his skills cards in action.

When we used the cards, I watched the reaction of the people in the room and I knew this was a great product. It's fun to use and it takes less than 15 minutes. It really gets people thinking about what their favorite skills are and how to build a career around that. For me it reminded me of some of my strongest skills which I'm not using now. That was an eye opener for sure.

It was then I decided this would be a great product to put online at CareerPlanner.com. Picture a computer card game of Solitaire. That's sort of what it looks like.

After months of intense software development, the online version of the Knowdell Motivated Skills Card Sort is available at CareerPlanner.com. And just to get people to try it, I'm offering a 25% discount to those who purchase it within the next 2 weeks.

To see a video about the Skills Cards, or to purchase a deck for yourself, click here.

Remember to use the discount code: "SkillsIntro" for your 25% discount. This will take the normal price from $12 down to just $9. This offer is only good for the next 2 weeks.

What Will It Do For You?

The Knowdell Motivated Skills Card Sort will help you identify the following skills:

Your Transferable Skills, which are the skills you can take from job to job, career to career. They are portable and they are yours.

Your Motivated Skills, which are the skills you truly enjoy using and you are really good at. Motivated and transferable skills are the skills you want to show on your résumé or CV.

Your Burn Out Skills, which are the skills you really don't like using. You want to leave these off your résumé and you want to make sure your job doesn't have you spending much time using them, or you will eventually hate that job.

Your Developmental Skills, which are the skills that you want to work on and improve. This could mean classes, special training, extra studying, new projects or just more practice and experience.

Skills Cards are Available to Both Individuals and Career Coaches

The online version of the Knowdell Motivated Skills Card Sort is available to both individuals and career coaches.

Career coaches can get volume discounts and can administer the Skills Cards to remote clients using our test administrator back office.

Are Skills the Only Consideration When Planning a Career?

There are 5 main things to consider when planning your career, and skills is just one of them:

1) Your interests

2) Your personality type

3) Your values

4) Your skills

5) Future job demand

 

Well, that's it for now.

I hope you try the Motivated Skills Card Sort. I think you will enjoy it and get a lot out of it. Let me know what you think.

As always if you have any questions, comments or ideas please feel free to send me an email at Michael@CareerPlanner.com

To your success,

Michael T. Robinson
Chief Career Coach
CareerPlanner.com Inc