2. Your achievements

As part of the process of finding work, you need to identify what you are good at, and why you are good at it. The skills you have used in your life achievements are likely to be ones you could use in work. Recognising these skills will help you choose which jobs to try for, and help you prove to your future employer that you’re the right person for the job.

Exercise: Using your worksheet, answer these questions for two of your achievements from the previous page. We have given some examples for someone whose achievement was to get their child into their first choice of school.

1. What was the achievement? eg Getting my child into the most suitable school.
2. What steps did you take to achieve it? eg I had to appeal. This meant filling out forms and going to a meeting and putting our case forward.
3. What did you have to overcome? eg I had to find out about a process I did not understand, I had to speak in front of people, I had to deal with bureaucracy.
4. What skills did you use? eg Communication skills, presentation skills, researching and gathering information, written skills, the art of persuasion, making a case, dealing with professional people.
5. What did you learn? eg That you have to persevere and put in time and effort to achieve anything. Even if you are not sure that it will be successful you still have to try.

Now that you have identified your achievements and some of your skills, we will look at areas of work where you might be able to utilise these skills.

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