Skills & Strengths: What do you do well? Interests: What do you enjoy doing? Values: What is important to you?
Not sure? There are a variety of assessment tools to develop a greater understanding your skills, strengths, interest, and values. These include self-assessments and tools to help you clarify your vision of life and work and serve as guideposts to align your skills and interests with work at Cornell.
Knowledge gained during the self-assessment process translates into
Greater self-confidence and stronger answers in interviews.
Eliminating options that will not be a good fit.
Increased awareness (but does not define who you are).
True career fulfillment may not always come from salary bumps and title changes. What moves the needle for you?
Skills & Strengths
You are unique in your experiences! Taking stock of your skills helps identify what you’re already good at and areas for growth, so that you can decide on possible careers and market yourself through personal branding. Understanding your strengths unlocks your potential and leads you to greater performance.
Each of these are available for free online at your convenience.
VIA Character Strengths Survey - a free self-assessment that provides a wealth of information to help you understand your best qualities.
Skills Matcher matches your skills with possible career options that might be a good fit.
Skills Search feature at O*NET – provides a soft skills list —interpersonal and thinking skills - needed to interact successfully with people and to perform efficiently and effectively in the workplace. Learn how they match up with various occupations.
Now that you've outlined skills, consider the following:
Which skills are the most developed?
What evidence do you have of your achievement?
How might you continue to strengthen them?
Which skills would you like to develop?
How did you select these as the key skills?
What activities can you get involved with to develop these skills?
What training programs or courses can you take to enhance these skills?
Interests
Identifying your interests can help you focus on the ideas and pursuits that keep you engaged, an important element of satisfying work. Interests help you understand
What do you enjoy most in your work and life outside of work?
How do your interests connect with the career options you are considering?
Free Online Interest Inventories
http://www.mynextmove.org/explore/ip - ONet Interest Profiler can help you find out what your interests are and how they relate to the world of work.
Holland Code Quiz This free career quiz uses the scientific Holland Code model to show you which jobs will suit your interests, talents, and aptitude.
Values
Values bring purpose, meaning, and passion to life. They motivate us and influence our decision-making.
They are the drivers that spur us to be our best at work. They can be very specific or very broad, and often fluctuate. When you know what drives you, your career follows a more definitive path.
Values bring joy when satisfied and create frustration and discontent when not satisfied. Values can change over time, so it is important to keep reassessing them.
Values can be external factors (e.g., salary, opportunity for advancement) or internal motivators (responsibility, sense of achievement).
Career One Stop Values Matcher. a quick card sort exercise that asks you to rank statements to define your ideal job. Your choices indicate your top values.
