# How to Check Your Skills Honestly and Know Where You Stand Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/check-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/check-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving building self-awareness at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Check your skills in six steps: list them, rate them honestly, get an outside view and compare them with your next role. Start with the free Job Skills Test. ## Key facts - Title: How to Check Your Skills Honestly and Know Where You Stand - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Setting Goals, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: check skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/check-skills/ ## What this page covers - Check your skills in six steps: list them, rate them honestly, get an outside view and compare them with your next role. Start with the free Job Skills Test. - Practical guidance for check skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation To check your skills, list what you can do across work, study and the rest of your life, rate each skill honestly, and then test those ratings against someone who has seen you work. Compare the result with what your next role asks for, and turn the gaps that matter into a [short plan with dates](/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-development-plan/). It is easy to put this off. Your sense of what you can do is probably built from grades, a few jobs and a lot of guesswork, and an honest check might show gaps you would rather not see. That is the reason to do it properly: a gap you can name is a gap you can start closing. The step that changes the picture most is the third one, and it is the one no quiz can do for you. ## How to check your skills in six steps A skills check is a short audit, not an exam. Each step depends on the one before it: you cannot rate what you have not listed, and an outside view only helps once you have your own ratings to set beside it. Do the first three steps carefully the first time; after that, every repeat builds on what you already have. ### 1. Take an inventory of what you can do Start with a list, and draw it from every part of your life, not only paid work. Skills come from work experience, from education and from personal experience: a volunteer role, a club you helped run, a project you organized outside class. If your work history is short, this is where most of your evidence lives, so do not leave something out just because it never came with a job title. Keep the list focused. You are not cataloging everything you have ever done; you want a set of skills you can actually rate and act on, spread across three kinds: technical skills (a tool, a method, a language from your field), [transferable skills](/knowledge/types-of-skills/define-transferable-skills/) you have used in more than one setting, and the workplace skills behind how you work with others and manage yourself. Next to each entry, note one situation where you used the skill and what came of it. Those notes are the evidence you will need later, and they keep the list honest. A skill with no situation behind it is still a hope, not yet something you can show. If a blank page is the hard part, a structured tool can scaffold this first pass. In England, the National Careers Service offers a free online Skills Health Check, a set of quizzes and activities on your skills, interests and motivations that points you toward suitable jobs. You can save your results, come back to them later, and download a report once you have completed at least one assessment. Treat whatever a tool gives you as a draft to check against your own experience, not as the final answer. ### 2. Rate each skill honestly Now sort the list. A simple three-way split works well: strong, adequate, missing. The point is to rank your skills against each other, not to award yourself a grade, so an uneven result is more useful than a page of high marks. If everything comes out strong, the rating has not done its job. Honesty cuts both ways, too: do not mark a skill down just because it came easily to you. The hardest line to draw is between a genuine strength and something you are merely competent at. Three questions help. How does the work go when you use this skill? How does it feel while you are doing it? What results does it produce? A real strength tends to hold up on all three. Something you can do, but find draining and only manage with effort, belongs in the middle group, whatever your grades say. Workplace skills such as communication or managing your time are the hardest to rate on instinct, because nobody hands you a grade for them. For that part of the list, [a structured workplace skills baseline](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) gives you ratings to set beside your own, and anything that comes out low is a skill you can still build, not a fixed verdict. ### 3. Get an outside view This is the step that changes the result most. Someone else often sees your strengths and weaknesses more clearly than you do, because they watch the results rather than the effort. Ask one person who has seen you work and will be candid, such as a supervisor, a tutor or a colleague from a part-time job, to look at the same list. Choose deliberately: someone who only wants to encourage you will give you a nicer picture, not a truer one. Formal skills assessment is built the same way. In August 2024, NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, released its Competency Assessment Tool for assessing students, interns and recent graduates on its eight [career readiness competencies](/knowledge/skills-standards/nace-competencies/). Every rubric in the tool comes in two versions, one for the student and one for an observer, so a self-rating is set beside someone else's rather than left to stand alone. NACE makes the tool available free to its members, career services offices and early-talent recruiters, so if you are still studying or interning, your career center or your internship employer is the realistic route to that kind of structured, two-sided check. [Make your request specific](/knowledge/self-awareness/questions-to-ask-for-feedback/). "How am I doing?" invites a polite "fine." Asking which skill on your list they would rely on you for, and which they would hand to someone else, gets an answer you can use. When their view differs from yours, understand what they mean before you explain yourself, and only then decide what to make of it. The gap between the two ratings is the most useful thing the whole check produces. Specific matters, because even good feedback can leave you guessing if nobody says what it is measured against. > Mostly, my worries didn't come true. What I did — even though I thought it was an unorthodox approach — worked. I remember having a meeting after a couple of months where I presented what I had found, and I got really good feedback on it. > > Still, you're left uncertain about what you actually contributed. Had the work I had done for two months contributed anything, or was it just something to build on? What was I actually being benchmarked against? You just went with your gut feeling. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and his last question is worth putting to your outside rater directly: compared with what? ### 4. Compare the result with a target role A skills check becomes a decision aid when you hold it up against something specific. Take a role you are aiming for, whether a job posting, an internship description or the next step in your current job, and mark what it asks for: technical skills, functional skills tied to the work itself, and behavioral skills in how you work with people. Then lay your combined ratings beside it. If you are already working, the person who assesses your work is the best source for this step; ask your manager what doing the job well looks like, in specifics. The comparison does two things. It shows which roles fit what you are already strong at, which is often more valuable than the list of gaps. And it tells you which gaps matter for this next step and which can wait. A weak spot the role does not depend on is not your priority right now, however much it bothers you. ### 5. Turn the gaps that matter into a plan Gaps only turn into progress once they become a plan. For each gap the comparison flagged, and two or three is plenty, write a learning goal, one or two concrete actions and a date. The dates matter most. They create accountability, and without them a list of gaps tends to stay a list. Make the actions things you can do inside the life you already have: volunteer for the part of a project that uses the weak skill, ask for one specific piece of feedback after a presentation, take on a task that stretches you a little rather than a lot. Skills like these grow through repeated practice, not through reading about them. None of the gaps you find is a fixed verdict on you; each is something you have not learned yet. ### 6. Repeat the check Treat every result as a snapshot. Your skills change with each job, project and piece of feedback, and so does your picture of them. A full check once a year, with a lighter review in between, for example after a new role, a big project or a performance review, keeps the picture current and shows whether the plan from step 5 is working. Keep your list and ratings from last time; seeing what has moved is half the value. ## What makes an honest skills check easier Look back at where the six steps get difficult: telling real strengths from things you can merely do, deciding which gaps deserve your time, and acting on a result that is not flattering. Each of those sticking points has a name, and each can be practiced. **Building Self-Awareness** is what separates a skills check from a self-portrait. It is how you tell your natural strengths from the things you are only competent at, and how feedback reaches the blind spots your own ratings cannot. Its core habit fits step 3 exactly: understand what the other person is telling you, add your own view, then reflect before deciding what it means. Without that habit, a check simply confirms what you already believed. **Setting Goals** is what gives the result a direction. A check that only lists deficits leaves you with a to-do list; one read against your strengths and your work values tells you which roles are worth aiming for and which gaps are worth closing. It also keeps the stakes in proportion. You are planning the next six to eighteen months, not committing to a five-year plan, and the picture will keep shifting as you gain experience. **Building Confidence** is what lets you act on a result you did not enjoy reading. Confidence in a skill comes from accumulating evidence that you can do it, so each gap becomes a small, manageable challenge to practice rather than a judgment on you. When one weak rating starts to color the whole picture, two reality checks help: is this always true, or not always? Does it apply to everything, or only to this? Which of the three is already your strong suit is hard to judge from the inside. **The free Job Skills Test** measures all three, among the twelve work skills it covers, so you can [find your strong suit](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and see where practice will pay off; a low result on any of them is a starting point, not a limit. ## The raw material is already yours Some of this may already feel familiar. If you have ever paused over the skills section of an application, wondering which lines you could back up with a real example, you were already doing the most useful part of a skills check: separating what you can show from what you would like to be true. The six steps simply make that habit deliberate. Whatever the check turns up, the gaps are things you have not learned yet, and you can build them without becoming someone else. An untested picture of your skills tends to matter more as the choices get bigger, such as which role to take or which stretch task to say yes to, and the remedy stays the same short check, repeated. What makes the next choice easier is knowing where you actually stand. ## Start with a picture you can trust All that is left is a starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve skills it measures, and which of them will make the biggest difference to your next step. Use it as the first page of your skills check, then test it against your own experience and someone else's view. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Check your skills in six steps: list them, rate them honestly, get an outside view and compare them with your next role. Start with the free Job Skills Test. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Setting Goals, Building Confidence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/check-skills/ Preferred summary: "Check your skills in six steps: list them, rate them honestly, get an outside view and compare them with your next role. Start with the free Job Skills Test." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.