Your Most Marketable and Developmental Skills

The top ten skills that you prioritized represent the skills that you would most enjoy using. Your greatest job satisfaction will come from using skills that energize you and bring you enjoyment. You want to target finding a job that allows you to use your most enjoyed skills for at least 80% of the time at work. Even in work that fits you well, there is typically a small percentage (ideally 20% or less) of a job that will involve using skills that you are neutral about or are “killer” skills (skills you don’t enjoy using and “kill” you emotionally and sometimes physically).

Developmental Skills

You may also have listed some skills you have little or no skill in currently but would enjoy using. These are examples of Developmental Skills – skills you can use in a future career transition (once you have had a chance to become competent in them) or can be utilized vocationally in a hobby or leisure pursuit. What skills would you like to develop from your CFT Skills Matrix?

Marketable Skills

A marketable skill is one that you can perform and is attractive to a potential employer. Your job target will dictate which of your skills are most marketable. If you are seeking a position as an accountant, the fact that you are a great cook is of little relevance. However, if you want to be a pastry chef, your “Cook/Prepare Food” skill is of prime importance.

The goal is to identify and target the type of work in which your most enjoyed skills are the ones that are needed to do the job successfully. If you love to design and create, you will be happiest in work that heavily utilizes that skill (like interior decorating, desktop publishing and graphic design, landscape architecture, etc.)

What are your most marketable skills on your Skills Matrix?

Interim and Survival Jobs

An important note: If you are in between jobs, face an imminent layoff, and need to find work quickly, focus your job search on positions similar to those you have had before that use your most marketable skills. As long as the labor market is good for that job, this will be the best way to obtain a job quickly. We call this type of work an “interim or survival job.” Once you have obtained an “interim job,” you can continue searching for work that uses your most enjoyable skills.

If you are an unhappy accountant who needs some income quickly, you should target finance-related jobs that use skills similar to those used in previous jobs. But, you may ask, what if those skills are “killer skills” that I want to avoid using? That’s OK—your immediate goal is to get an “interim” or “survival” job to get some income and thus buy yourself the time to find a career path that uses your most enjoyed skills. Once you have a paycheck, you can focus on finding work that uses your most enjoyed skills!