Meet Aaliyah
Aaliyah has always received positive feedback on presentations she’s delivered at university, but she doesn’t feel truly excited about presenting unless she’s sharing findings from her own research projects.
However, Aaliyah has a real passion for two things: coding and research. As a psychology student, she particularly enjoyed modules where she could create surveys, collect and code data, and then interpret the results. She’s also skilled at it – her dissertation research project received an excellent grade. So, while presenting might be a strong skill of Aaliyah’s, coding and conducting research are her true super strengths.
Recognising research and coding as her super strengths will be valuable as she considers future career paths. Roles that centre around analysis, data processing, and research—such as market research, academic research, data analysis or software development would allow her to use these strengths every day. By focusing on career options that require these skills, Aaliyah will likely find herself in work that energises her and brings out her best, leading to both personal satisfaction and professional success.
“Why do strengths matter?” you might ask. Well, when using Aaliyah as an example you can see that making your strengths part of your career can lead to lots things:
- Fulfilment at work: Utilising our strengths in the workplace will likely lead us to experience higher levels of satisfaction and gratification in our roles.
- Finding your niche: As you better understand where your super strengths lie, you’ll be able to better understand which roles you would succeed in, helping you to discover your niche.
- Better teamwork: Teams that look to utilise the strengths of its members are more productive. If you’re aware of your strengths, you will be able to identify where you can support your team and add the most value.
How can you identify the things that you do well?
- An outsider’s perspective can help overcome internal biases that we have when we think about ourselves and our performance. You might want to try asking family members, friends, people from your course or from your workplace about words that would describe you – you might even find out strengths you didn’t know you had!
- Think about when you’ve enjoyed a piece of work, a university module, or a part-time work or volunteering experience – what was it that made you love it so much?
In our society, it can often feel like everybody expects you to be perfect all of the time. Whether wanting to ace our exams, having pressure from parents, or from ourselves, we can feel like we need to continuously improve until our weaknesses are our strengths or our super strengths. Nobody, however, is perfect, and you’re unlikely to be able to eradicate ALL of your weaknesses. But what we can do instead is focus most of our energy on honing our strengths and spending a little bit of time identifying and mitigating weaknesses that may be holding us back.
Over to you
Answer the questions in the workbook to start identifying your skills, strengths and super strengths.
Feel free to share anything you would like to discuss with your fellow learners in the Comments.
Graduates into Work: North Yorkshire - ‘Finding Your Why’
Graduates into Work: North Yorkshire - ‘Finding Your Why’
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