Motivated Skills Assessment

Assess your motivated skills - those you enjoy using

Motivated skills are skills you enjoy using. Wouldn’t you rather be developing and strengthening those skills instead of continuing to use and excel at skills you don’t enjoy using? We’ve all been there. Not everything you’re good at is something you want to continue doing. Let’s go beyond “transferable skills” to focus on doing more of what we enjoy, which will strengthen our career well-being. The activity in this article will help you do that.

First pioneered 20 years ago by Bernard Haldane, Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington (UW), assessing your motivated skills is a practical, effective way to identify skills you’ve used in past successes -so you can reuse them to create more success and good experiences. One of the main benefits of this approach is that YOU name what those skills and strengths are, instead working off of someone else’s list or words. When you name it yourself, it’s easier to remember and communicate to employers.

Another great thing about motivated skills is that they apply at any age. Even for high school or college students who have not yet had much exposure to the adult job market, can use motivated skills. School and community activities are a great source of developing motivated skills.

The key is to do this exercise with your support system - people who know you, who can give you feedback. If you can find someone trained in Dr. Haldane’s motivated skills - also called Dependable Strengths - that would be ideal. But you can start with this activity. The UW Career Center also has a great PDF handout on Dependable Strengths.

Good experiences

Start by making a list of all those achievement, accomplishments, or similar "good experiences" that you have had in the past 2-5 years, whether work-related or not. Those,

  • You feel you did well,

  • Enjoyed doing, and

  • Feel proud of.

You’ve got to have all three. You’d be surprised what a challenge it is to come up with these.

Rank order them and choose the best.

How did you make it happen?

Now, for each one, write down or tell someone,

  • What you did,

  • How you did it, and

  • What happened.

  • Add these skills to your list.

This is actually harder than it looks. Be sure to focus on and write down what you did to accomplish that good experience. Be specific about all the things you had to do to make it happen. It may feel at time self-congratulatory or boastful, but think of it as being factual. These good experiences didn’t magically occur - you had to set some things in motion for it to happen.

Review your list and make a mark next to any of the skills you consider your "motivated skills," the skills you most enjoy using. You can look at lists of skills online for ideas - but remember to use your own words to describe what you did when necessary. Sometimes they are different.

In our Resources FOCUS section, we have tips for communicating these motivated skills to employers.