Step 4 to a Portable Career – Identify your talents, skills and experience

As you’ve been doing some of the soul searching work in defining your life purpose, uncovering your personal values and reconnecting with your passion, you may unconsciously have already exposed some of the things that you know how to do. When you define what you’re good at, the things that pop are your:

• Talents (these come natural to you and they’re your strengths);
• Skills which are the things you do that make up the tasks and responsibilities you performed at work, at home, at leisure time or throughout your life experiences. They can be “hard” skills (usually acquired through education, special training or on-the-job experience), “soft” skills (related to your attitude and behavior) or “transferable skills” (transferable to different settings
• Experience which you would easily gather from your CV or resume

It’s time now for you to make an inventory of all the talents and skills you possess so that you can define which ones you LOVE applying in your day to day life / work. Skills areas that are easily transferable to a Portable Career are: personal, fundamental, leadership, technology, business, information, communication, physical, people, teamwork, reasoning, working with numbers, crisis management, and technical skills.
(Source: Employability Skills 2000+)

I’d encourage you to not only depend on your own answers in creating the overview of your talents and skills. Receiving a 360ᵒ feedback from the people who know you best (loved ones, family, (ex-) colleagues, and friends) can be extremely valuable as you easily overlook the skills and talents that you possess and use regularly without giving them much thought!

Once you have the overview, the next step that will get you closer to defining your portable career is to spend some quiet time thinking about how you want to and can apply the skills in your current environment. Some skills transfer more easily to a location than others and you won’t necessarily get to use all your skills at the same time. If you trot around the globe often you can imagine yourself traveling with 4 suitcases: one suitcase is packed with skills and talents that you can adapt to the needs and demands of the location that you are moving to. The second suitcase stores the skills and talents that are at no use in your location for the time being, but they may come in useful in another location. The third suitcase has the collection of skills and talents that are easily transferable, while the fourth suitcase stores the talents and skills you’d like to develop more based on your curiosity and goals. (Source: Skills Cycle in a Career in Your Suitcase)

Knowing your skills and talents inside out allows you to bring them into a portable career that is a perfect fit for you, and which brings you the fulfillment that you are seeking.