Skills developed outside work
Track down the skills you have gained from everyday life
You have valuable knowledge, understanding and skills from everyday experiences, and through training, hobbies, interests and involvement with voluntary organisations.
Identifying your skills
Think about
- your experience and the roles you’ve had outside work
- the projects you have undertaken
- organisations, clubs or societies that you have been involved with, or voluntary work you have done.
Each of those roles demands different skills.
- If you enjoy DIY, then you have no doubt planned a project, set yourself timescales, organised your work and seen it through to completion.
- If you have chaired meetings, then you have taken a leadership role and been diplomatic yet assertive. You have kept to deadlines and ensured that individuals have been included. This demonstrates interpersonal skills.
If you haven’t been in formal employment for a while, think about the other skills you've developed.
We have a competency called task management, which is a really around the ability to prioritise and organise, and what you often find with mature students is they score very highly on that competency, because they often are balancing working and studying at the same time, perhaps with family commitments as well. And that takes some skill to be able to do that and too often I think students, mature students don't recognise that. They just think that's life but actually that really does demonstrate to us the ability to prioritise and organise some very difficult priorities, so there's commitment there as well. There's absolute drive to succeed outside of your working life.
Ruth Stokes, Head of Recruitment and Resourcing, KPMG
Record your work and personal achievements
Use the Work and personal achievements form (RTF, 14KB) (completed example RTF, 24KB), to keep a valuable record for your planning and development.
Need more help?
Contact a careers adviser if you'd like more help reviewing your skills and experience.