There are many benefits to focusing on your strengths when choosing and applying for a new career. Studies have reported increased confidence, career satisfaction and career direction when students and professionals are aware of their skills. This article explores those benefits and how you can use your strengths in your career choice, applications, and interviews. Read on to find out how…
What Are Your Strengths?
When defining strengths, we are going to consider three different types: personal strengths, professional strengths and mental strengths.
Your personal strengths are skills or character traits that you are good at.
Professional strengths are those skills and traits that are relevant to your work. It is often appropriate to change the wording of the strength to adapt it to the work environment. For example, bravery could be changed to ‘willingness to tackle tough projects’.
Mental strength is your ability to cope with stress and difficult situations. For example, having mental endurance or adaptability to deal with changes to your circumstances and keep going.
What Are Your Weaknesses?
Your weaknesses are the opposite of strengths, as they are the skills and character traits that you are not good at. These can be areas that you have not learned, practised or had experience before.
It can be a mistake to focus on trying to improve your weaknesses, unless the weakness is a necessary area to learn to achieve a certain goal or career. This is because it is easier to learn those skills that you enjoy doing, therefore you are more likely to be successful when you focus on developing your strengths.
Why Your Strengths Are Important
As mentioned above, mental strength enables you to cope with changing situations and stressful events so that you can remain resilient and avoid burnout or breakdown. This gives you great career adaptability.
You can work on developing your mental strength, as well as your personal and professional strengths. Skills can be learned and practised. Traits can be developed through experience and intentional improvement.
Many studies have demonstrated the importance of focusing on your strengths. Here are a few recent examples from different professions and countries:
Self-awareness of strengths was self-reported to increase confidence and appreciation for what student nurses and social workers in New Zealand had to offer in their work (Ingamells et al., 2013). Strengths awareness also helped them with their studies, personal breakthroughs and career direction.
A recent study of Japanese nurses found a direct enhancement of career satisfaction following perceived supervisor support for strengths use. There was also an indirect enhancement of perceived employability (Matsuo, 2022).
Strengths-Based Career Couseling (SBCC) has been found to increase self-esteem post session, and increased employment rate (80.6% compared to 60% from the comparison group).
5 Tools To Help You Discover Your Strengths
- Strengths Lists (type ‘strengths list’ into a search engine)
- VIA Character Strengths Inventory (Peterson and Seligman, 2004)
- Clifton Strengths Assessment
- Cappfinity Strengths Profile
- High 5 Test
There are many other strength assessments available. Find the ones that suit your needs. Taking more than one assessment is a good way to check the reliability of results. There should be a good degree of agreement between the answers if they are reliable tests.
You can also take personality assessment tests, which will also indicate your strengths in relation to your character strengths. More on personality next week. You can sign up below to get updates so that you don’t miss out!
How Strengths Can Be Used in Your Career
Inform Career Choice
Your strengths, along with your values and personality, are a vital part of the preparation for choosing a new career. You can sort your top priorities based on this awareness for career selection. For more information on how to use your strengths in your career choice process, read: 3 Proven Steps to Choose a Career, or enrol in the course ‘Career Choice Psychology: 3 Steps to Choose a New Career’.
Resume/CV
If you take a look at professional templates for CVs and resumes relevant to your chosen industry, chances are that many of those templates will include a skills section. Skills are one of the most important areas that employers look for, as that is what you will be bringing to the work. There are different ways of showing your top skills on your resume/CV, from lists to showing heat scales or barometers to show how expert you are on each of the top relevant skills for those roles.
Applications
Applications for jobs frequently have a section requesting details about how you fit with the skills requested in the job description. Employers ask about strengths to ensure that you are a good match for the role, but also to see if you have self-awareness and plans for future development. Even applications for funding, such as for setting up a business or further education. can ask for a description of your skills as part of your business plan or personal application.
Interviews
Common interview questions about strengths and weaknesses are:
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- What is your main strength?
- Why are you good at _?
- How does this strength help you in your work?
- Where do you see yourself in 5 years? (One of the best answers to this question is to talk about developing certain strengths and using them for future impact).
A simple template for these answers is to say what you are good at, how you developed that strength (learning, experience etc.), and how that impacts your work, or can be developed further in future.
For useful examples of how to answer questions about your strengths and weaknesses in interviews, see this article.
Business/Self-Employment/Freelancing
Whether you are advertising a service or a product, customers will be interested in what your skills are, and what you have to offer them. Customers will not want to hear about your weaknesses, so a strong self-awareness of where you shine and promoting that will inspire confidence in your customers to hire or buy from you.
Professional Development
Awareness of your strengths can fuel your desire for further learning. We tend to enjoy learning what we are already good at and developing those skills further, rather than trying to learn something that is not a strength. This can also help to develop expertise, which makes you more rare and valuable in the workforce.
Conclusion
Research shows that awareness of your strengths can help you to choose and achieve your next career with great satisfaction and confidence. You can apply your current knowledge of your skills to your resume/CV, applications, interviews, business communications and your plans for further learning and development.
Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment to let us know your top 5 strengths and how you are going to use them in your career 🙂
References:
Ingamells, K., Napan, K., & Gasquoine, S. (2013). Strengths in action: A pilot study of a strengths development programme within tertiary education utilising the Clifton “StrengthsQuest” and “Narratives of strengths” interviews. Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work, 25(4), 71–84. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.310807777192641
Littman-Ovadia, H., Lazar-Butbul, V., & Benjamin, B. A. (2014). Strengths-Based Career Counseling: Overview and Initial Evaluation. Journal of Career Assessment, 22(3), 403-419. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069072713498483
Matsuo, M. (2022), “The role of supervisor support for strengths use in promoting perceived employability and career satisfaction”, Personnel Review, Vol. 51 No. 5, pp. 1587-1603. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-01-2021-0026
