Skills and strengths

What are the essential skills you need at this point in your career? What new skills have you acquired or put into practice? What are your particular strengths, and how are you utilising them?  

• Take a basic inventory of the key skills needed for your role. Give yourself an honest score for your current levels of confidence and competence. Note down your most relevant evidence to back up those scores. Balance your assessment with third-party feedback, e.g. by asking colleagues, reviewing student evaluations, or perhaps participating in a 360 process. 
• Continuous learning and development are commonly understood to be essential to most people’s long-term work satisfaction. As academics, this doesn’t just mean facilitating the learning of students and early career staff; it’s also about your own learning and growth. Are you creating adequate opportunities to acquire new skills yourself? What else would help you in your career progression? 
• Do you have strengths that are currently being underused? We won’t necessarily be able to utilise all of our strengths at work all of the time, but it is important to understand if you have talents which we are not deploying. Over time, this can lead to dissatisfaction and frustration.