Chapter 1: Knowing yourself

Self-awareness is a key element of finding and securing employment. The following tips and advice will help you to develop your levels of self-awareness by getting you to reflect on:

• what you can and can’t do now
• what you need to do next.

1. Assess your preferred style of working

Think about your style of working. The first thing you need to be aware of is your preferred style of working. This will give you a good insight into how you’re likely to behave in your new job.

Think about how you work in a number of different ‘working environments’, for example:

• at university
• in a business environment (e.g. on a work experience placement)
• in everyday activities.

2. Describe the positive things about how you like to work

Take a piece of paper and write down all of the positive things about working in the environments that you’ve identified above.

3. Filter the positive words and phrases that you’ve identified

Take a highlighter pen and highlight all of the key words and phrases that you’ve written down.

The following text demonstrates this by using an example of a real individual’s ‘style of working’ at university:

4. Describe the negative things about how you tend to work

Write down all of the negative things about working in the environments that you’ve identified.

The words and phrases that you capture above will help you to recognise the things that you might want to avoid in your new job.

5. Assess your strengths

Make a list of all your ‘work-related’ strengths.

Now think of some examples that you could use to demonstrate each of the strengths that you’ve written down; try to think of at least five examples of each strength.

6. Assess your weaknesses

Make a list of all your weaknesses (even if you don’t think that they’re relevant to the workplace).

Be honest about your weaknesses and list them all.

What you need to do next

7. Assess your personal barriers to finding employment

You need to assess all of the things that are standing in the way of you getting a job today. These are called your ‘personal barriers to finding employment’. They will probably fit into one of the following categories:

• physical barriers (e.g. the job’s located too far from your home)
• emotional barriers (e.g. you don’t think that you’re capable of doing the job that you want)
• knowledge-based barriers (e.g. you don’t have all of the required knowledge, skills and/or qualifications)
• experience-based barriers (e.g. you don’t have enough experience)
• financial barriers (e.g. the job that you want doesn’t pay enough)
• other barriers

8. Assess what you need to do in order to overcome your personal barriers to finding employment

Finally, look at each of your personal barriers individually. Write down all of the things that you need to do, and all of the changes that you need to make, in order to overcome them.

These tips and practical steps have been sourced by Creative Choices° and written by the team at 1st Steps to Success Limited. You can visit their website for more information and to download a more comprehensive guide (or ‘Knowledge Insight Pack’) which includes plenty of examples, tips, practical advice and easy-to-use templates that will help you to find and then secure full-time employment..