‘About Me’ Skills Builder

There are thousands of careers to choose from and countless training pathways that will help you reach your career goal. So how do you choose which career you want to do? Use our ‘About Me’ Skills Builder Career Planning tool to help you.

Before you can decide what you’re going to do with the rest of your life, start small. Focus on yourself – your interests, your strengths, your hard and soft skills. Often our values and characteristics, combined with our personality type and learning preferences, can make some occupations a better fit for you and mark others as completely unsuitable.

Start by making a list of what you’re good at, what you enjoy, what is important to you and what you’d like to achieve. This will make it easier to understand which career options could be a match and warrant further research (and which ones to strike off your list).

Our ‘About Me’ Skills Builder will help you do just that. Once completed you can use it to make a list of occupations to consider, before narrowing down your options and creating a short-list of potential career goals worthy of future research.

How to use

This is your opportunity to write all about you! What makes you great, what you enjoy, what inspires you and what you hope to achieve.

Fill in each box with notes, doodles, statements or bullet points to help you understand where you’re starting from and where you’d like to go!

• My Skills: make a list of all the things you’re already good at. This could be ‘soft’ skills or personality traits like being a good communicator or team player, or ‘hard skills’ or technical competencies like coding, technical drawing or grade 8 piano!
• Hobbies: write down what you enjoy doing in your spare time. This could be in a formal setting – like a club or extra-curricular activity – or an informal activity that you do just for fun, like reading or going to the park with your friends.
• Skills I want to learn/improve: think about skills that may be important for your future career or ones which you were better at. Add them here together with any suggestions of how to improve them or why you want to.
• Interests: add in anything you like to learn about, what topics you feel passionate about or things that you find interesting to discuss with your friends or family. You never know when an interest could lead to a lucrative future job opportunity!
• Future Aspirations: make a list of what you’d like to achieve in the future. This could be your dream job or career, or not work-related at all (like where you’d like to go on holiday, whether you’d like to own a pet or learn to drive for example!)
• Words that describe me: it can sometimes be difficult to think about our own strengths. Sometimes it’s easier to consider how others would describe you or things that people have said about you in the past.
• Problems I want to solve in the world: do you have a creative idea to make things better in your community or chosen industry? How will your future career have an impact on those around you or further afield?
• What I’m good at: write down one thing you think you’d be good at doing or can already do particularly well.

Once you’ve completed the ‘About Me’ Skills builder, you can start to think about jobs and careers that may use these skills in the future. Find out about what qualifications, skills or work experience they may require and do some research into how you could develop new skills to help you progress towards your career goals.