Career Planning & Strengths Assessment

Explore Your Dependable Strengths™!
Recognizing your strengths is the first step to discovering a career fit that maximizes your opportunities for success and satisfaction. Dependable Strengths™ are motivated skills that are used repeatedly in experiences in which you have done well and enjoyed what you were doing. The more you know about your strengths, the more you will understand how to adapt to the changing demands of the workforce. By using your strengths you will be able to improve your interpersonal relationships, build your career, increase your job satisfaction, and reduce stress on the job. Equally important is your ability to clearly articulate your strengths to potential employers and provide evidence of those strengths.

Four Basic Steps to Exploring Your Strengths.

1. Accept yourself as having a unique kind of excellence that is always growing within you.
   
2. Recognize that the elements of your excellence have been demonstrated from time to time throughout your life. These elements have most likely been demonstrated in good experiences you have made for yourself.
   Good experiences, in this case are defined as: things you feel you did well, you enjoyed doing them, and you were proud of what you did.
   
3. Believe that by carefully identifying and studying your good experiences, you will find the pattern of skills and talents you have repeatedly used to make those experiences happen.
   
4. Focus on using this pattern of skills and strengths. They are reliable elements of your special excellence.
   This pattern of strengths provides clues to the kinds of career activities that are likely to be part of your future achievements regardless of your job titles or job descriptions.

Five Questions to Identify Ten Top Good Experiences that will assist in Identifying Patterns of Strengths……

1. What is the good experience that first comes to your mind? Describe it briefly in the space below.
   
   What did you do to make it happen and what strengths did you use?
   
2. What activities give you the most enjoyment? These could include hobbies, volunteer work, ventures, projects with the family, work, school or anything else.
   
   Give two or more examples.
   
3. In your last assignment, activity or work, which parts of it did you do best and enjoy most?
   
   Give two or more examples.
   
4. After completing your formal schooling, which two or three subjects did/will you continue to study and enjoy most?
   
5. Briefly list up to ten (10) good experiences from any time of your life and any part of your life.
   
   What did you do to make them happen and what strengths did you use?

After answering the questions above, begin to examine patterns within your good experiences. What strengths are demonstrated throughout your experiences? In highlighting these strengths, are you able to give three or more examples of how you have used that strength in a number of ways in various environments? This information will help you craft your resume, as well as assist you in your interviews. Working within your areas of dependable strengths only increases your potential and career satisfaction. Be sure to discuss this assessment with a career specialist.

Based upon the work of Dr. Bernard Haldane, Center for Dependable Strengths, 2006