Assessing Your Skill Depth
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Along with the work you’ve done from the previous two posts to assess your skills and interests, CareerForce offers another assessment called the Skills Matcher to assess your level of expertise in 40 different skills. In addition to better understanding your strongest skills to share with prospective employers, this assessment can point out less developed skills that need improvement to help you gain better employment. After completing this assessment, review your full list of skills that you recently made and rate every skill either using your best judgment or seeking help from your support person to accurately assess your strength at all the skills you have.
- Log into your job seeker account and complete your Skills Matcher assessment
o Be sure to save your results for future reference
o If one is not available on your state’s job seeker website, you might benefit from taking the CareerForce assessment, but know that you won’t be eligible for appointments, events, or other such personal support from CareerForce if you’re not a Minnesota resident
- Read through the results of your assessment and reflect on your depth in various skills
- Review your list of skills from the other day and rate each one with the 1 to 5 scale used for the Skills Matcher assessment, to help you see where you’re already strong and what to work on next
Complete your Skills Matcher assessment
Log into your job seeker account and look for an assessment like the one linked above. If using a CareerForce account, completing this 40-question assessment should only take about fifteen minutes. A preview of this assessment is shown here:
A sample of the CareerForce Skills Matcher assessment.
Notice that the skill level increases exponentially from Beginner to Expert; going from Beginner to Skilled is a much smaller jump than going from Skilled to Expert. It’s okay if you have few or even no skills at the Expert level on this scale; use that level as a longer-term goal to reach for any skills relevant to your career goals. The most important outcome of this assessment is to gauge how advanced you are at various skills, which can help to narrow down what job you should try to get next or what skills you need to deepen to prepare for the work you want.
Read and reflect on your assessment results
After completing your assessment, consider some questions and ideas like these:
1. Was there anything about your assessment results that surprised you?
2. Maybe your results suggested you’re stronger or weaker at a given skill than you expected, or maybe the assessment made you aware of skills that you’ve never considered before.
3. As you review the careers recommended in your results, does any one career stick out to you as promising and worth a closer look, based on its wages, educational requirements, and long-term outlook?
Don’t limit yourself to considering just the career suggestions that show up in these results. Use them to broaden your employment considerations and to better understand the details of those careers.
Rate the skills you recently identified
Going beyond this assessment itself, you should try to candidly rate your level for each of the skills you’ve recently identified on the same scale. Rating your skills alongside your support person can improve the accuracy of your assessment by that person acting as a sounding board and providing their own perspective. As you rate each skill, you’ll identify ones that you want to improve on both for your next job and to advance your career where you want it to go in the long run. On top of helping you more accurately assess your current skill levels, your support person may have good ideas about what you can do to improve specific skills.
Conclusion
Complete your Skills Matcher assessment today to better understand your depth in specific skills and how that lines up with different career options. Be open-minded about the results in case you find your depth in a skill to be different from what you expected, or you discover a skill that you weren’t aware of before. Even if you’re not at an expert level for any skill in the assessment or on your personal skill list, don’t be discouraged and use that level of skill as a goal for your longer-term professional development. Rate each of your skills to make your skills profile more useful for preparing for and landing your next job and making more money!
Log into your job seeker account and complete your Skills Matcher assessment right away!
The next step on the roadmap: Writing Your Best Resume
