Identifying and Developing Your Skills: A Guide to Self-Reflection

For this assignment each student is required to seriously consider and identify their skills skills that you are amazing at, skills that you are not so great at, skills you wish you had and skills that you avoid essentially skills that will impact your ability to perform and work in teams and business environments.

Taking the time to think about your skills is a type of reflective practice, an exercise where you really spend time reflecting on things/situations/or skills, in this case, so that you can improve, understand or be able to better express yourself; so how do you do this? Great question, one way is by taking inventory using a SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis is a tool that can be used both personally and professionally to help you assess and develop your skills:

Start with The Conference Board of Canada: Employability Skills website and take another look at the skills that are needed globally in the workforce and when working in teams. Then go to the right hand of the screen and scroll down to the “Related” section and click the Employability Skills Toolkit link.
 
Next, click the link to download a fee preview of the Employability Skills Toolkit. Then read the following pages from the  Developing your Employability Skills Toolkit PDF from The Conference Board of Canada, the pages are in the order that they are presented in the PDF, you’ll need these pages to help you with your reflection:
 
• Page 8 Provides an example of what a skill looks like and examples of how that skill can be demonstrated.

• Page 40 Provides an example of how to write about your skills and identify if you do not have that skill yet.

• Page 5  Provides an example of a reflective exercise.

o Additionally you can refer back to the MindTools Personal SWOT Analysis website if you need more help describing skills

In a MS word document, use the headings provided for each page and complete the following:

a. Using the skills from the employability skills website, identify 2 skills for each part of the SWOT - 8 marks

b. Describe what each skill involves and provide an example of how you demonstrate or indicate that skill needs to be developed if you do not have an example – use page 8 & 40 of the PDF to help you with this part - 8 marks

c. Complete a SWOT for yourself– use a SmartArt or a create a formatted table to complete this - 4 marks. In the SWOT place the skills that you identified in part a, in the appropriate area - 4 marks

d. Reflection write about 3 challenges that you have that you can turn into opportunities for yourself, use the reflection questions from page 5 of the PDF to develop your response  6 marks. Write 1  paragraph per skill each paragraph should be 4-6 sentences; be sure to check for any spelling or grammatical errors – 5 marks