How to do a skills audit for career transition success

Nikki Paterson Author

Discover how to conduct a skills audit to identify your transferable skills and address any skill gaps to leverage your experience in a new career.

In today's world, career transitions have become increasingly common. Whether you're looking to switch industries, pursue a new role, or explore a different career path, conducting a skills audit is a crucial step towards ensuring a successful transition. In this blog post, we'll explore the process of conducting a skills audit and how it can empower you to make informed decisions about your career transition.

What is a skills audit?

A skills audit is a tool for evaluating your current skills and capabilities and the level they're at and it's also a great way to create a catalogue of evidence that you can use in your job application and interview.

It's essentially a systematic process of reviewing your current skills and helps to identify gaps in knowledge, skill levels, and experience, and allows you to create a plan to build upon these skills.

A skills audit can be a high-tech affair, inputting data and receiving customised results or it can be as low-tech as a pen and paper and your thinking cap. There's no right or wrong way.

Some organisations implement skills audits on a large scale to identify skill gaps and to effectively manage their human resources but what we're talking about today is an individual skills audit, where you're self-assessing your skills for the purpose of career development or transition.

Why do a skills audit?

Ooooh, so many reasons: 

1. It helps you identify any 'auto-pilot' skills that you didn't necessarily know you had; those skills that you use effortlessly in your day-to-day work. This is the remedy to underselling yourself in your job application documents and your interview; know your skills and showcase them.    Experts often struggle to explain how they do a task or what skills they use because they 'just do it'. A skills audit helps you identify and nut out the fine-grain skills you use.
2. Helps you develop self-awareness around your current skillset and areas for improvement to help make informed decisions.
3. Helps you identify transferable skills.
4. Identifies areas for targeted skill development, which also helps you make informed decisions around where you spend your time, effort and potentially money.
5. It can provide evidence-based data to help make informed career decisions.
6. The process gives you a list of evidence you can draw on in creating winning job application documents and giving stellar interview responses.
7. Builds confidence and self-assurance in your skills and capabilities.

How to do a skills audit if you're transitioning careers

I find an Excel spreadsheet the easiest way to do a skills audit but you could pen and paper it if that's easiest for you.
Here's how to do a DIY skills audit (or you can download our free pre-prepared skills audit here):

1. Open an Excel spreadsheet and title 4 columns: Skill required for the role, My skill level, Need to develop? Evidence of skill.
2. Review the role and industry you'd like to transition into and come up with a list of skills required and enter these into the column you titled 'Skill required for the role'. Don't skimp here. This is probably the most time-consuming part of the process but it will pay dividends in building your knowledge and understanding of the role and industry that will payout when writing your job application documents and building on-point interview answers. Spend the time trawling job sites and doing internet research, looking at the skills, experience and qualifications listed for relevant jobs. Industry research is also useful here, look for trends, advancements and demands in your target industry and role.
3. Move on to assessing your skills against the required skills and remember, no one's watching, so this is the time for an honest self-evaluation. Using the column you titled 'My skill level' assess your strength of each skill. If you're an Excel whiz, you can add some drop-down menus into this column to make the process easier, otherwise just type your skill level into each cell.
4. Next, assess if you need to develop any of these skills and enter your results into the column you titled 'Need to develop?'.
5. Then it's time to make a list of examples of when you've demonstrated these skills in the column titled 'Evidence of skill'. There's no need for long paragraphs here, just a few dot points or times when you've demonstrated these skills.

Now What?

Now that you have your skills audit completed, you can use it in a few different ways:

1. You now have a clear picture of your skills and strengths, and you can use it to help you identify the direction you might like to take with your next career move.
2. If you've identified that you have a skill gap, you can now create a plan to target and develop that particular skill, including allocating time and resources to acquire that skill. And a side note here - don't overlook what your current employer has to offer to help you develop these skills. Even if you're looking to leave, it's worth seeing what current opportunities or training that you might be able to snavel that work towards bridging any skill, knowledge or experience deficits.
3. And probably most importantly, you can use the results of your audit to improve your job application documents and your interview responses. Now that you have a comprehensive snapshot of the skills required along with your skills and examples of when you've demonstrated those skills, you can stop underselling yourself and start shining a spotlight on those highly transferable and high desirable skills that you have. Don't underestimate the value of your skills, even if you're looking to apply them in a new industry. They're called 'transferable' skills for a reason; you can pack them and take them with you.

Summary

A skills audit is a valuable tool for anyone looking to make a career transition. It can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, develop a plan to fill any skill gaps, and showcase your transferable skills to potential employers. So take the time to do a thorough and honest assessment of your skills and how they rate against your desired career, and use the results to guide your next career move and put a spotlight on your highly transferable skills to position yourself as a competitive candidate.