Career Center – Self-assessment

Creating your profile

This is all about your own personality:

• Your values, beliefs and principles: What guides your thoughts and actions? What is important to you in your private life – it may well be important in your working life too. Examples might include work-life balance, family, your value system or a sense of order. Your values provide useful guidance when looking for a job, helping you identify suitable sectors, products, roles, companies or their corporate culture.

• Your interests: If your working environment allows you to engage with topics that really fascinate you, you’re bound to be highly motivated! Think back over your life so far and consider the things you’ve particularly enjoyed doing. These will give you clues as to suitable sectors, fields of work or roles when looking for a job.

You can assess your skills as follows:

• What successes have you achieved so far?
  • Knowledge: school qualifications, vocational training, studies, further training, etc.
  • Professional and personal experience: project management, voluntary work, time spent abroad, hobbies, etc.
• What are your strengths (and weaknesses)?
  • Technical: Specific technical knowledge in your professional field; this may have been acquired through theory or practice.
  • Methodological: Presentation skills, public speaking, facilitation, time and self-management, project management, academic research, etc.
  • Interpersonal: Ability to work in a team, communication skills, conflict resolution, interpersonal skills, negotiation skills, persuasiveness, etc.
  • Personal: Initiative, flexibility, willingness to learn, decisiveness, resilience, empathy, etc.
  • Leadership: ability to delegate, team leadership, management skills, goal-setting skills, etc.

Methodological, social and personal skills (‘soft skills’) – alongside professional competence – are usually the key determinants of success in both professional and personal life. Analysing your full range of skills will show you which tasks suit you best and which you can therefore tackle successfully. Soft skills are also cross-disciplinary skills which, unlike hard skills, can be transferred from one profession to another and continuously developed. You often have to work hard to acquire hard skills from scratch, but soft skills such as ‘communication skills’ remain with you and enhance your profile.

In addition to the self-assessment of your skills, you should also seek the views of, for example, family members or friends (external perspective). This can provide you with valuable additional insights that you may not have considered yourself. It may also be helpful to speak to professionals (e.g. career advisers, psychologists) or to use personality tests or potential analyses.

"Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?" is a common question in job interviews. You should give careful thought to your personal goals, set them down in writing and work towards them. This enables you to identify with job descriptions and companies, and to shape your career path in line with your goals.

However, don’t just set yourself ambitious goals; get into the habit early on of identifying and defining intermediate milestones on the path to achieving them. In this way, you will enrich yourself through structured thinking, demonstrate a controlled, goal-oriented approach to work, and be able to align your own goals flexibly with those of the company.