Your skills

Skills are abilities you’ve developed and can use effectively. You learn skills from your experiences. These include voluntary, paid or unpaid work, and family and community responsibilities. Basic skills are important when working within a fast-changing society:

1. communication skills (reading, writing, creating online content, communicating visually & evaluating information)
2. social intelligence (connecting meaningfully with others and wanting to make a difference)
3. teamwork (negotiating, motivating and engaging with diverse groups online and offline)
4. problem-solving and novel thinking (creating unique solutions to problems)
5. information management (filtering and making sense of information)

You will learn new skills in each module of your qualification. These can help you become employed and improve your community contribution. You need to connect what you learn at university with what you can contribute in the workplace and in your community. As you study and your skills develop, your frame of reference will expand and you will become aware of more opportunities to apply the new skills you have developed.

Activity: My skills

Think about your life experiences (work, studies and personal) and link them to specific skills that you have developed. Also, reflect on how these skills relate to your career choices.

• Can you identify themes in terms of the skills you have developed? For example, are all of them related to financial aspects or helping others?
• What skills do you still want to develop?
• Can you link specific occupations to your skills? Which specific job titles can you think of that will enable you to use these skills?

Further resources

O*Net online has a function where you are able to search for occupations linked to specific skills. Click on “Advanced search” and then on “Go to skills search”. Select the skills you would want to use and then on “Go”. You will then get a list of occupations that are related to the skills that you selected.

Download the Reflect on Skills document to help you think about how you are developing skills while you are studying and to help you identify your areas of development.