Market Yourself

GS6203

Learning about myself

Having a clear picture of your unique talents, interests, values and skills will be the base of your
career-planning journey.

Tips for completing self-assessments:

• read instructions carefully

• be honest
• remember it’s not a test – there are no right or wrong answers. If you do not answer self-
assessment questions honestly and accurately, you will end up with information that will
not behelpful to you in your career planning.

1. Work/Life Experiences

Your work and life experiences help shape who you are and may include:

 hobbies
 sports or other leisure activities
 volunteer work
 paid work
 travel
 unpaid work

When you review these activities, you may begin to see patterns or themes. These patterns can help to
set you apart from other job seekers with similar work experience or education.For instance, you may
notice that your life /work related experiences, involve a high level of challenge, or problem solving, or
dealing with people, or customer service, etc.
Activity
Use the space provided to list your work/life experiences (ex: management training, customer service,
soccer coach, volunteering, etc.). Look at your list – do you see any patterns or similar roles (ex:
leadership roles)? If yes, use a variety of coloured highlighters to identify patterns (ex: highlight all
leadership roles in yellow).

Events hostess Reading

Registration office Student Body President – high school

Marketing products Marketing events

Team Leader Sales

Student president (high school) Traveled to Jordan

Think about how the experiences you listed could relate to your career. Are there any experiences that
could lead to paid employment? Highlight those in a different colour.

2. Learning Experiences

Your education and learning experiences shape the type of work that you are able to do. These
experiences could include formal schooling (ex: general education development, high school,
college,university). They could also include informal education and training (ex: professional
development, courses, seminars, workshops). Be sure to consider learning you’ve done through your life
experiences(ex: volunteering, on-the-job training, family life).

Activity
Use the table provided on the next page to list your education experiences (courses completed,
professional development workshops).
Formal learning  High school
Diploma
 University
(continuous)

Informal learning  E-Gov

Seminar
 University
Workshops –
Explore, BRM

 ACCA
Learning goals?

3. Personal Attributes
Everyone has characteristics and personality traits that make them unique. These form their personality
or personal style. Knowing your style preferences will help you to choose an occupation or work
environment where you can be yourself and be appreciated for who you are. Although you may
sometimes need to work in situations where you can’t totally be yourself, it’s hard to keep this up long
term.

There are lots of different assessments available to help you determine your personality preferences or
personal style. Some common assessments include:

• Personality Dimensions®
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®

Activity
Use the space provided to list five to 10 of your strongest personal attributes.
 1. Ambitious
2. Leader
3. Adaptable
4. Enthusiastic
5. Emotional
6. Trustworthy
7. Flexible
8. Organized
9. Committed
10. Entrepreneur

4. Work Values
Knowing and understanding what’s important to you about work will help you to choose an
occupation and a work environment that matches your values. Are you most concerned with earning
enough money to pay your bills or advancing your skills and experience?

Based on the work values activities you have done in class list below your top five work-related values.
Explain briefly why they are important to you.

Honesty – I believe this is an important work value as it helps to be sincere about your work to
get the most effective and efficient results. As well as, to improve and evolve in the future. To
also avoid conflict.

Commitment – Meaning valuing your work and setting deadlines, achieving goals, trying to
improve, providing the best effort for your work.

Recognition – I value the recognition of their work as it helps boost the confidence and motivates
them to do better. It is very important for future development in the work place and out.

Communication – Whether written or verbal, any kind to communication helps as it aims at

avoiding conflict and develops a conversation for the best work progress.

Creativity – Have an imagination and the ability to create work and evolve from the current
position to another using ideas, goals and different approaches.
 5. Skills

Skills – or abilities – are things that you are able to do. Some skills are job-specific and can be used in
only one line of work. Skills that can be used in many occupations are known as transferrable skills.
You may have developed these skills in school, on the job, volunteering or through life experiences.In
your career journey, you might hear about “soft” skills and “hard” skills. Soft skills are sometimes called
“employability” skills. These are the skills you need to enter, stay in and progress in the world of work.

Activity

Access this link https://www.kent.ac.uk/careers/sk/skillsinventory.html to analyze our employability

skills and follow the instructions to complete the table below:

1. Choose 5 skills that you currently have and provide a brief statement as evidence of your claim

2. Choose 3 skills that you need to develop and that are relevant to the job you would like to do in
the future. Explain briefly how you plan to develop those skills

Skills I have Evidence Skills I need to Development plan

develop
Organizing and I organized my assessments Managing time Arrive early, set deadlines ahead of
motivating depending on the rubric, so I set time, organizing work.
a schedule.// Motivated team
members by showing
appreciation and recognition of
their work.

Taking initiative Working in groups, I take the Handling objections Be able to handle criticism whether
lead and organize our work to my argument constructive or not, in a
depending on the plan. professional manner.

Listening to others Keep an open mind to listen to Being sensitive to Try to be sensitive and learn about
opinion others and take their opinion body language other people’s body language.
into consideration.

Taking If I were to make a mistake, I

responsibility of would take the blame and
my action responsibility, then try to fix and
handle the situation.

Working under
pressure Be able to handle pressure of
working under a tight schedule
with unorganized time
management