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Assessing Your Skills After a Job Loss

Recognizing your own blend of abilities — and being able to communicate them — can help you market yourself.

Why think about skills?

After a layoff, your top priority may be Job Search immediately. But you'll be more successful if you start by thinking about your skills. Recognizing your unique blend of abilities — and being able to communicate them — can help you market yourself to prospective employers. It may also give you insight on areas where you need Education and Training to upgrade your skills.

Transferable skills

If you've been laid off, you may need to Switch Careers. Start by understanding how your skills can transfer to new industries or occupations. Transferable skills are general skills. See skill and ability videos for more details. They include things like:

  • Math and computation skills
  • Reading and writing
  • Speaking ability
  • Science skills
  • Critical thinking
  • Management skills
  • Technical skills
  • Repair, maintenance, and troubleshooting skills
  • Computer and technical skills
  • Communication, persuasion, or coordination skills

If you've been a fast food restaurant manager, can you jump right into being a hotel manager? Maybe. The key is to recognize which of your skills will be valuable to a prospective employer, and know how to Market Yourself.

Assess yourself

Learn more about your personal skill set by taking a self assessment. Take several assessments to learn as much as you can about your skills and the jobs that match them. Different assessments tell you something a little different about yourself.

ISEEK's Online Skills Assessment lets you rate your skills. Once you complete the quiz, ISEEK will list occupations that match your skills. From there you can link to more occupational details.

Use CareerOneStop's Skills Profiler to find occupations that use skills similar to your previous job. You can also create a list of your skills and match them to job types that need those skills.

Try O*NET's Skills Search to select skills from a list and then view occupations that use those skills.

Are you realistic, investigative, enterprising, conventional, social, or artistic? Use O*NET's Interest Profiler to learn how your interests relate to occupations. Create your own "interest profile" that corresponds to matching occupations.

Is it more important to you to develop relationships or work independently? Do you care more about having a supportive supervisor or good working conditions? Take O*NET's Work Importance Locator to learn which occupations are the best match for what you value at work.

The MnCareers Interest Assessment is based on Holland's Interest Inventory. When you're finished, you'll have an interest profile that matches your interests to various career areas.

Get more help

Need more guidance understanding your skills or matching your skills to the workplace? Professionals at your local Minnesota WorkForce Center are there to help.