Assessing My personal strengths and weaknesses and how I have developed them successfully to enhanced my career. This semester has been extremely eye opening and rewarding I have identified and learnt various strengths and weaknesses in such a short amount of time. The very first assignment has been extremely fundamental to my first semester, it has helped me become more aware of myself and my skills. I now have the expertise about myself I can identify my weaknesses from my strengths. This has helped me to develop my weaknesses into employable skills and how I can develop a weakness into a strength. I used my Personal development plan to contribute to the development of my three weaker skills, the first being self-doubt, team work and procrastinating. Semester one has endeavoured me with many of my qualities one of them being that I work far better on my own than in a group, with team work being a skill that I need to improve and the hard facts that I score a higher grade on my own original piece of work compared to when I work in a group, therefore if I want to be able to continue to achieve grades that I individually, I need to implicit myself into team work.
Another weak employability skill that I identified on my PDP is my self-doubt. I want to improve on my self-doubt because I have learnt that if I don’t believe I can do it no one will be able to. I know that if I want to be successful in life I cannot doubt myself every time I complete an assignment therefore I am working on how to control and better myself.
Finally, my third weak employability skill is my tendency to procrastinate. Procrastinating has been one of vital weaknesses from a young age, I always tend to drift from focusing my attention from one aspect to another, therefore I have tried to improve myself from not procrastinating as it can be destructible to my future work and assignments. These three of my weaker employability skills I am trying to improve on and better myself through various sources which will be explained in this assignment. The first employability skill I identified on my PDP that I need to improve drastically on was the fact that I always self- doubt myself. Self- doubt is one of my top weaknesses something I have always found difficult to control and overcome. I have always initially self-doubted myself from a young age, it recently started to become an issue during exam season. ‘make each day your masterpiece’ (John Wooden, no date).
During assignment one my self-doubt rose again, moving from school into university was a massive opportunity but it came with a lot of fear, fear of failure particularly. Having to submit my very first assignment of the semester was daunting and my self-doubt became apparent. In order to tackle my, self-doubt I took it upon myself to take action, I stated in my PDP that I was going to go to counselling, however when I went on the university’s website I found that they offer online counselling so I decided to use that first to see if it had an impact on me.
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I used the online self-help programmes which directed me to a website called living life. One quote that helped me is ‘the key to change is self-acceptance’ (Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. 2015) I read a book called ‘why do I feel so bad’ the book outlined why I self-doubt and how I can overcome it simply by changing my diet or what activities I do it’s a step by step to breaking down the cycle of why I feel so bad constantly, small steps will help overcome my self-doubt. This form of method was extremely beneficial to me as I was able to get an insight as to why I may be constantly self-doubting myself. Another way that I decided to help overcome my self-doubt was watching YouTube videos in particular one by ted talks called freedom from self-doubt this was very informative but the main message of this video is that the past should not dictate the future, therefore I can learn from my failures and turn them into positives. ‘failure is only the end if you decide to stop’ (Richard Branson- No date).
I have learnt that I need to be approving of myself and to stop worrying. ‘trust your guts and values’ (Bruna Martinuzzi, 2013) as it will help to overcome my self-doubt. After reading an e-book by Dale Carnegie called, how to develop self-confidence and influence people by public speaking. I was able to understand certain ways to improve and overcome self-doubt and why people like me in fact everyone at a point in their life will suffer from self-doubt. One quote that stood out to me in the book was ‘unless a person has thought out and planned his talk and knows what his going to say, he can’t feel very comfortable when he faces his, auditors’.
(Dale Carnegie 2011). My second employability skills I want to improve on is team work. Team work is essential for success (Cameron, S 2016).I have always despised team work, this is due to the fact that no matter how much hard work you put in someone who doesn’t always gets to take credit for it also. During semester one I was faced with this problem, unfortunately because it was too late to change groups I had to stick it out. According to Belbin’s theory team work is “A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.
” (Belbin, 1981). During induction week, we had to present a short presentation to the entire cohort the entire group consisted of six people however when it came to finally presenting there were only three of us. In order for team work to become one of my top skill employability skill I had to take action, therefore I decided that I was going to watch other groups to see how they interacted with each other and how an excellent group presentation is conducted. It was clear from the video that in order for an excellent group presentation it was no only about the information but about your body language as well, giving eye contact to the members in the group and not talking over each other shows that you are professional and know what you are talking about. I am going to attend career development week also on the 12th of February 2018 which will help me as there will be all kind of workshops run between the four days. During my second group presentation, I took all of the negatives from my first presentation and turned them into positives we received far better results, as a group we achieved a higher grade of 62%. This quote really stuck of to me and shows me to perspectives of team work ‘Great things in business are never done by one person.
They’re done by a team of people’ (Steve Jobs, no date). However, to conclude I still prefer to work on my own as I still get individual better results. According to Kolb’s learning style theory ‘people naturally prefer a certain different learning style’ (Kolb’s, 1974) My final employability skill I wanted to improve on was my need to procrastinate.
Procrastinating is something I have always done I always get distracted by something else, therefore it’s important for me to try and stop as it can affect my future. The first action I took upon was having a goal and setting deadlines therefore every time something important came up I decided to prioritise certain tasks to their importance. ‘They learn better taking their time to think’ (Mobbs, 2010) I was set three assignments that are all due in around the same time, two on the same day, therefore I drew up a plan which days I was able to fully commit to my assignments and which days I was working to fully get the most out of my days. The best thing about setting deadlines was that I knew what I had to work towards I knew how long I had and when I needed to do a certain piece of work which essential got me to do all my work on time and efficiently. ‘you need to schedule when you are going to work on a project’ (Elizabeth Lombardo Ph.
D 2017). After studying the self-determination theory, I was able to conclude that I am motivated by getting better grades. (Edward L. Deci and Richard M.
Ryan, no date) During my time at university I have also developed in other skills and abilities for example my organisational skills being the top. I have improved drastically on my organisational skills, studying full time and working along-side each other I have to be constantly efficient and time affective. From the start of university, I have had to prioritise certain tasks to meets deadlines. Moreover, from assessing my SWOT analysis my personal life was an initial threat, trying to fit in university work around my part time job and balancing a social life as well has had its challenges, therefore in order to stop myself from sacrificing my entire life, being organised has truly helped if I have all my university work undergoing a month before deadlines I don’t end of cramming a few days before the deadline and therefore should reduce my self-doubt as well. As you can see in my appendices I attended a careers interview to help guide me in relation to my CV.
This careers interview was very enlightening I was given actions that I need to take upon to my CV employability worthy. The areas discussed were re wording certain heading to make them more informative and to the point. In the appendices, you will find my career action plan, it’s outlined the next three years, five years, and ten years of my career and where I want to be. The key elements from my career action plan the first initial step is to complete my degree and graduate with a first class, this is an important factor for me because it’s the first step to securing my dream career. If I don’t graduate with a first-class degree in 2020 my entire career could be put on hold in order for me to fully do what I want. The next part in my career plan is securing a graduate placement with Jaguar Land Rover as they offer an excellent graduate programme with the ability to grow with the company and have opportunity’s. finally, the last step in my career action plan at ten years I want to be at the peak of my career, becoming a qualified project manager, with JLR I want to grow with this particular company because of the opportunity’s that they offer including benefits.
Finally, to conclude I wrote a letter to myself during the start of assessment one sealed it up, and only opened it today, it contained my feelings about the starting university. My letter to myself was very personal as it contained aspirations of mine including wanting to develop skills that would be beneficial towards me on this course. The most important piece of information in this essay is that I want to put more effort into my work I feel I have this semester I feel like my work is my art and I really want to do well and exceed exceptionally throughout my time in university.
