7 Self-Discovery: Identify Your Strengths
There are multiple ways to identify your strengths. You may already know what some of them are. But if you are unsure, ask people who know you and work with you. You can ask them what they see as your strengths or ask them what topics they would come to you for support and advice. Alternatively, you could make a list of skills and ask people to identify which you are strong in. (Steps 2 through 4 of this guide provide lots of skills to choose from; a list of skills is available in the appendix material and on the book’s website heatherwhiteman.com/pa-career-guide).
If you want to get a more validated assessment of your strengths, you can consider something like the Gallup Clifton StrengthsFinder which includes a test to identify your strengths backed by research spanning over 14 million people worldwide and over four decades. There are also plenty of other free surveys out there to identify your strengths. Just know that most of those surveys aren’t rigorously studied and don’t go into specific technical skills assessments, so evaluate the results critically.
When getting feedback about yourself from others. It’s “okay” to only pay attention to the findings that resonate with you and ignore some. If you find yourself saying “Yeah, I do tend to do that” it’s probably accurate. If not, just move along. When identifying strengths, don’t limit yourself to only skills you think are aligned with People Analytics. The point of this activity is not to do a tedious or rigorous assessment. It is meant to encourage you to spend time thinking about the skills and strengths you have today that you can leverage now.
To keep track of the strengths you identify, fill out the below table.
[Note about the activities in this book – you will encounter multiple activities throughout this guide, you may want to create copies of the templates so that you can save your responses. You will come back to many of these exercises later in the guide. ]
| My Top 5 Strengths | Why This is a Strength for Me: | How could I apply this to a People Analytics Career: |
| Example:
Inquisitive |
I am always asking “why?” I want more info about everything and to know why it happened. | I could take business problems like “people are quitting” and identify the important questions such as “what types of people are quitting?” “what are the reasons for leaving?” “does one group leave at a higher rate than another?” so that an analyst could answer them with people analytics. |
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* Feel free to add more rows, you are great at so many things!
Once you have taken time to identify your strengths and how they apply to a People Analytics career, be sure to save the list. When you apply to a job, head into a performance discussion, or just feel discouraged, pull the list out. You are already awesome and have everything you need to get started. So why not get started now?
“Everyone can probably do at least one thing better than ten thousand other people.” – Marcus Buckingham