Employability Skills Checklist

Are you more than your employability skills checklist? It always a look at the 8 most important employability skills. Take a look and see if you are more than the sum of these parts….

Heres the employability skills checklist advice from a government site:

“Generally speaking, there are eight skills that employers want you to have, no matter what industry you’re working in:
Communication.
Teamwork.
Problem solving.
Initiative and enterprise.
Planning and organising.
Self-management.
Learning.
Technology.”

Yep! I thought you might feel like you have more value than just these skills listed. As important as these eight are, as unique individuals, we have hundreds of skills, gained from 1000s of experiences, all packaged entirely differently from anyone else in the whole world.

I learned today to also watch out for the employability skills we have, or are even using daily, that we are not claiming and benefitting from. The invisible skills. “Why would you not claim a skill?” I hear you exclaim. Primarily we may be skill-blind because of a belief about ourselves or message we have taken on board from our past, that prevents us from even seeing it. A past perception could be preventing us from beneiftting from what is rightfully ours.

It has taken me four decades to say these words outloud. “I am a writer”. And it took a very skilled individual approaching me, in a very elegant manner, to get me to see that fact at all. Why is it a fact? It is a fact because I write every day of the week. It’s a fact because when I write well and I give myself permission to do so, writing gives me joy. Therefore, all the evidence i can see says that I am a writer.

Why could I not see or claim this? Because as a 7 year old, being left handed, I smudged my ink from my fountain pen. Because in my fathers opinion I “used too many words”,  and because, in a writer-friend’s opinion in my 20s, I “couldn’t punctuate”. These are old messages. These messages no longer serve me. Knowing these messages no longer have relevance, I can push them far away, and, choose new things to believe of myself. The result as I created the time to write the piece I wanted to write. The result was I gave myself permission to write. The result was a thoroughly enjoyable working experience. The outcome of this enjoyable experience was that I wrote well……

Once we can name those parts of ourselves, those skills that make us thoroughly employable, that we have denied for so many years, then we have the chance to enjoy then. The we have the chance to honour our skills and take time to engage with them wholly. When we really engage with these skills we can begin to learn and indeed earn from them too.

The invisible skills, once they rise to the surface of our consciousness, can be the strongest in our skill set. These are the ones that have developed in the dark, despite (or indeed to spite!), those negative beliefs we were handed so long ago. These invisible skills have become strong and enter our employability skills checklist with real vigour, once released into the world.

If there is something you would like to do, or in fact are doing regularly, then take a minute to investigate what might be stopping you from naming and claiming it. This might be an invisible-skill just waiting to make you as employable as can be. I’m a writer. What invisible skill do you have?

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