Find Your Specialties And Advertise Them

In a period of intense competition for every job opportunity, it’s the specialists who tend to stand out from the crowd. That’s an excellent reason for you to find and highlight your specialties and strengths.

To begin, go back over your work history and — if recent enough — your years of schooling and early development. What were your most remarkable accomplishments? Your most enjoyable interests and activities? What brought you the most praise from others?

These are important clues to your special talents and abilities. But as you review your history of activities and accomplishments, don’t think small; think big.

For example, suppose you stated the chess club in your high school. Sure, that’s an indication you may have an unusually strong interest in the game, but from a larger perspective it’s an indication you may possess special organizing or leadership talents that you can apply not just to forming an interest group, but to succeeding in your next position. Last decade’s chess club organizer may be this decade’s top sales person, games developer, event organizer, or visionary entrepreneur.

Or suppose you enjoyed singing and were told you had a beautiful voice. Your first thought might be to try and pursue a musical career. If that’s not in the cards for you, consider that your enjoyment of singing could stem from a deeper appreciation of music, which could point to special interests and talents in the areas of cultural anthropology, history and mythology or story-telling, entertainment, or even music programming. You could have identified the special talents it takes to succeed as a teacher, a radio personality, or even a motivational speaker.

The point is: your successes in past employment situations will very often yield clues about where you can reasonably expect to succeed in the future. Here’s how to proceed:

1) Think carefully about the contributions you made to each task, each project, each team, and each organization.

2) Look for places and situations where you made a positive difference, where you helped overcome obstacles, and where you left behind lasting improvements.

3) Think back on situations where you exceeded the expectations of others, where you earned special recognition, or where you felt particularly comfortable and competent.

4) Comb your history for the personal abilities you demonstrated in each of your successful experiences.

After reflecting on a number of your past experiences, you may begin to see a pattern. Do the same strengths keep shining through? Do you seem to perform best in certain structural or organizational situations? Do you feel most positively about yourself in particular contexts?

Are you perhaps good with people? with machines? with numbers? with ideas? Do you handle pressure well? complexity? Do you thrive in repetitive situations, or are you better responding to surprising demands that never occur again?

5) Step back even further and look at the overall picture of you that’s emerging. Can you begin sum up who you are and what you can do well? Can you describe the kinds of situations where you might fit and where you don’t?

Don’t worry if you can’t identify your underlying specialties in an instant. It usually takes some time to fully assimilate this “big-picture” information. Sleep on it. Talk about yourself and your experiences to those who care about you. The more you sift through this information, the more certain it is that you’ll recognize what you do best and where you can look for new opportunities in which you’ll shine.

Once you understand your specialties and strengths, as well as any unique qualities you may have, you can re-write your résumé, re-orient your job-search strategies, and re-think how you handle interviews, all with a view toward putting yourself in the strongest possible position to forge ahead with your career and your life.