Self Assessments

Knowing yourself is the key to finding the right employment. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses, your technical skills and transferable abilities allows you to market yourself most effectively to a prospective employer. We suggest that you begin by taking the Kiersey Temperament Sorter.

Once you have determined your four-letter personality type by using the Kiersey tool, an excellent book to follow up with is Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type. The authors are Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger, and the book is available in most bookstores and at the public library.

We refer to skills as being technical or transferable. Technical skills are related specifically to a job, for instance; programming, electronics repair, balancing financial statements, even dog grooming. As a DeVry graduate, you have specific technical skills related to your program of study.

On the other hand, transferable skills are skills that can be carried from any job experience into your new career, such as communication ability, customer service, or time management. Both of these types of skills are valuable to you in an interview, and ideally, this self assessment section will assist you in recognizing your skills.

Exercise #1
Once you've done a skills inventory, we suggest you write a self assessment statement. This statement must illustrate the benefits you can offer an employer based on your knowledge of employer needs, and on a self assessment that takes account of your education, work experience, personal qualities, and interests.
It might help you to write this as if you were answering a prospective employer's question: "Why should I hire you?"

Using Proof by Example
In the third edition of Career Directions, by Donna J. Yena, the use of Proof by Example is outlined in the following steps:

1. Present three concrete examples of a skill you wish to offer to a potential employer.
2. Qualify examples by describing circumstances (who, what, when, where, why, how).
3. Quantify examples with measurable data (numbers, percentages, frequency, volume, years, months, weeks).
4. Specify results...what happened? (data, specific outcomes.)
5. Link and think. How will each statement help the employer visualize increased profits, decreased turnover, improved productivity, improved worker morale, less personal frustration, solution to problems?

Use these steps in describing your technical and transferable skills.

Exercise #2
This assignment will help you identify and highlight some of your most important personality characteristics. Using your "Type" profile from the Kiersey Temperament Sorter, complete the following steps:

1. Using the type profile, identify ten key phrases that are most true of you.
2. Pick your three top strengths, and use proof by example as shown above to demonstrate how you've used each strength successfully.
3. Identify your top three weaknesses. Also using the proof by example method, demonstrate how you've overcome or are improving upon this weakness.

Goals and Values
Other things to consider while doing self assessment include defining your goals and values. At this point in your career, remember you are beginning to assess companies in terms of how you can grow, as well as what you can do for them. This means considering the things that are important to your personal as well as professional life, including job location, growth opportunity, travel involved, management style and company culture.