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Get A Better Job: Knowing yourself

by Rod Ashley

Many people don’t want to work for an organisation ….. they want to work with it.  In other words, they want their own skills, aptitudes and experiences to be recognised, used and developed.  But if you don’t know what you can offer, how can you expect others to do so?

Knowing yourself is not the touchy-feely concept it sounds.  As the management and leadership writer John Adair (www.johnadair.co.uk) said: ‘Know the task, know the team, know the individual’.  Effective management and leadership derive from this inter-relationship. There are limits to how far you can effectively manage others if you do not know the strengths and weaknesses of your own range of management styles.  To achieve this requires awareness, understanding and the ability to reflect on experience in order to create effective future strategies.  What are the things which motivate and enthuse you?  What irritates you?  What depresses you?  Do others know how to ‘read’ you?  Do they know your likely response to problems, to challenges or to crises?  When you transfer this self-knowledge to a potentially new working environment, how are you likely to react?  What situations will play to your strengths, allow you to rise to the challenge and bring out the best in you? What will send you scurrying for cover?  Teach Yourself Getting a Better Job provides a toolkit for getting to know yourself in a structured manner so that you can grow in self-knowledge and effectiveness.


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Get A Better Job: Biography - Rod Ashley Rod Ashley owns Ashley Consult (www.ashley-consult.co.uk), which incorporates Ashley Associates and CATS.  It provides consultancy and training services to a wide range of clients, such as local authorities, the BBC, universities, private companies, the European Commission and the Welsh Assembly Government.
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Get A Better Job: Multiple choice questions 1. How would you define ‘employability’?
a.    Being ‘job-ready’ in terms of job-specific skills.
b.    Retaining your attractiveness to employers by developing and displaying those abilities and attitudes in demand.
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Answer: b – as defined by William Bridges in his book Jobshift.  The previous Labour government and Jobcentres tended to use (d), NVQs can focus narrowly on (a) and not respond rapidly to changing conditions. (c) alone is not enough.  Employability is explored more fully in Chapter 1 of Teach Yourself Getting a Better Job – and throughout the book readers are given clear steps on how to develop their employability skills.
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