Playing to your strengths

The aim of this section is to increase your understanding of your ‘Strengths.’  A strength is an activity that you carry out on a regular basis, that you perform well at, and that you enjoy doing - and even energises you.

 

Understanding your strengths can help you to evaluate different jobs options and see how they can play to your strengths - or alternatively avoid your weaknesses!

 

Watch this short video which explains more about strengths in the workplace.

 

The Strengths Profile Model

 

CAPP, a firm of Occupational Psychologists have produced the  R2 Strength Profile Model. This is based on 60 different skills or attributes that people most commonly have or use, for example,  listening, writing, persuading, taking pride in your work, being organised, hardworking, competitive, etc.

 

These skills can fall into different categories:

 

Realised Strengths – these are things that you are good at and which give you energy. You get chance to use them regularly. In an ideal world, you should ‘Marshal’ these strengths – use them when you need to but don’t overuse them unnecessarily otherwise they may become de-energising!

 

Unrealised Strengths – these are things that you’re good at and give you energy but which you don’t get to do quite so much of at the moment. These represent opportunities for you to develop yourself and work towards your goals so you should try to ‘Maximise’ their use.

 

Learned Behaviours – these are activities which you are good at but drain you. You should aim to ‘Moderate’ your use of these skills and use them less in the workplace in order to prevent ‘burn out’

 

Weaknesses – these are things you’re not good at and which don’t give you energy. Try to ‘Minimise’ your need to do these activities. Only work on developing these behaviours if it is necessary to help you achieve your goal, otherwise avoid having to use them wherever possible.

 

We each will have a different set of strengths, weaknesses and learned behaviours and the following interactive card sort exercise (used by kind permission of CAPP) will help you to identify these. This should take you 5 - 7 minutes.

Whether in a career or even now during your time at University, you might want to consider what opportunities you have for using your unrealised strengths more and for further developing your realised strengths. Also watch out for any of your realised strengths which you might have over used.

 

Click on the graphic and download the strengths definitions list to your portfolio. Note your 'Realised Strengths' and 'Unrealised Strengths'.  You may also want to see if you can identify and record your 'Learned Behaviours' and 'Weaknesses'. When researching potential job ideas, try to think how these jobs might play to your strengths - and avoid your weaknesses!