# Your Current Skills: What You Have and What to Build Next Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/current-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/current-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 How to take stock of your current skills: sort them into three types, rate your real level, find evidence for each, and decide which gaps are worth closing. ## Key facts - Title: Your Current Skills: What You Have and What to Build Next - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Setting Goals, Working with Your Manager - Primary keyword: current skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/current-skills/ ## What this page covers - How to take stock of your current skills: sort them into three types, rate your real level, find evidence for each, and decide which gaps are worth closing. - Practical guidance for current skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation Your current skills are the abilities you can demonstrate right now, with evidence — not the ones a degree says you should have or a job ad asks for. Taking stock means listing what you can do, sorting it by type, rating your real level, and comparing the result with what your next step requires. Maybe an application, a [resume](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/transferable-skills-for-resume/) or a review has forced the question, and your honest answer feels thinner than it should. That is a common place to start, and rarely an accurate one: most people undercount what they can do, and the gaps that do show up are learnable. What changes the picture is how you look, and that starts with what you allow onto the list. ## What counts as your current skills The most useful way to take stock is a small personal audit: a structured look at the abilities, knowledge and experience you already have, held up against where you want to go next. Done well, it gives you something better than one long list. You end up with two halves of a picture, the strengths you can build on and the handful of gaps that actually matter for a specific goal, instead of a vague sense of not being enough. Start wider than feels natural. Skills you built outside paid work count: a student job, volunteering, a student organization you helped run, a project you finished on your own time. If the page stays blank, go back through every role you have held, part-time ones included, and ask what each one actually demanded of you. Running the register through a Saturday rush, keeping a group project on schedule when one member went quiet, explaining the same policy to an annoyed customer twice without losing your patience: each of those required something specific. Students and recent graduates tend to miss skills precisely because they only look at formal jobs, while most of their real list sits somewhere else. ## The three types of current skills Once the raw list exists, sorting it shows you what you are working with. One established scheme, used by Illinois State University's career services, divides skills into three kinds: functional skills, which you can use in almost any setting; work-content skills, which are knowledge tied to a particular field or job; and adaptive skills, which describe how you manage yourself. The same scheme makes a point worth holding on to: all three can be considered transferable. The names vary, and the same groups also go by transferable, job-specific and self-management skills, so treat the categories as a way to organize your own list rather than a test with right answers. ### Transferable (functional) skills [Transferable skills](/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills-definition-and-examples/) are the ones that travel with you across jobs and industries. The University of Alabama Career Center gives communication, teamwork and planning as typical examples. Because you build them in seminars, group projects and part-time work as much as in any full-time job, they probably make up the largest share of what you can already do. The work here is translation. "Kept a five-person project on track" becomes a transferable skill only once you name what you actually did in terms a workplace recognizes, such as setting the deadlines, coordinating who did what and following up when things slipped, and attach the result. Without that step, experience from one setting stays invisible in the next. ### Job-specific (work-content) skills Job-specific skills are knowledge or tasks you learned through classes or on-the-job training, tied to a particular occupation. The Maryland Department of Labor's skills identification guide uses writing code and operating specific equipment as examples. They are the most visible type, because job requirements name them outright, and usually the easiest to prove with a course, a certificate or a work sample. Their limit is that they depend on the field. Fluency in one statistics tool can matter a great deal in one role and very little in the next, so these entries tell you most about which kinds of work you are already equipped for. ### Self-management (adaptive) skills Self-management skills describe how you manage yourself, your work and the people around you; the same Alabama career center groups reliability, patience and persistence here. They are the hardest current skills to prove and the easiest to claim, which is why a list of adjectives does so little. "Reliable" on its own says nothing. "Covered extra shifts during exam season without missing a coursework deadline" is evidence. These are behaviors you show, not traits you were born with, so every entry in this group needs a situation attached. If you cannot find one yet, that is useful information too: it marks a skill you can start practicing on purpose. ## Why an honest picture of your current skills matters A list tells you what you have done. A rating tells you how well you could do it again. Give each skill a simple level, such as low, medium or high, or one to five from beginner to mastery, and the difference between something you managed once and something you can deliver reliably becomes visible. Next to each level, note one situation that justifies it; a rating you cannot back with an example is a guess. That is the line between a genuine strength and a skill you are merely competent at, and it decides what you lead with in an application or a conversation about your next role. Rating yourself has a known weakness: people can [overestimate or underestimate their own abilities](/knowledge/self-awareness/dunning-kruger-effect/). For the workplace skills on your list, such as communication or working with a manager, the free Job Skills Test gives you [a structured first rating](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) to set beside your own, and where the two disagree, you have found the entries worth a closer look. The other correction is [feedback from a colleague](/knowledge/self-awareness/questions-to-ask-for-feedback/), supervisor or manager, because they see the results of your work rather than the effort that went into it. Praise alone does not settle the question, though. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described what was still missing after a meeting where his work was well received: > 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. What he lacked was a benchmark: a clear sense of what good looks like in the role and where his work sat against it. That is what to ask for. Instead of "Was this OK?", try "What would have made this stronger, and how does it compare with what you expect from someone in my position?" The answer gives your rating something real to stand on. ## Turning your current skills into a next step With levels and evidence in place, compare each skill with the level your target role or next step requires. Read a demanding job description as a checklist of shortfalls and the result is discouraging and unfocused, but not every gap is equal, and not every skill needs advanced proficiency. So rank them: which two or three gaps actually stand between you and the next step? Those get your attention for the coming months. The rest can wait, or may never matter for the work you choose. Read the comparison in the other direction as well. Where your current level already meets or exceeds what the role asks, you have found what to lead with, and often a clue about where you will do your best work. Every gap that remains is a skill that can be learned, which makes the ranked list less a verdict than a plan. ## Seeing your skills clearly, and using what you find Look back over that process and three things did most of the work: how clearly you see yourself, where you choose to point what you find, and whose outside view you can get. **Building Self-Awareness** is what keeps your ratings honest. A natural strength shows up in three places at once: how you go about the work, how it feels while you are doing it, and the results it produces. When all three line up, you have found something to build on; when only the results do, you may be competent rather than strong. Feedback covers what self-reflection cannot see, and it works best when you ask for specific, forward-looking advice on one piece of work rather than a general verdict on you. **Setting Goals** turns the inventory into a direction. Instead of trying to close every gap a job description reveals, put most of your energy where your strengths already are, and look for roles and tasks that use them. Plan in short stretches of six to eighteen months, and let each one teach you something about which kind of work fits you. Seen this way, your current skills are the starting point for exploring, not a ruling on where you belong. **Working with Your Manager** gives you the outside view that counts most once you are in a job. Your manager sees your results and knows what the role needs, which makes a regular one-on-one the natural place to ask where your skills stand and which ones matter most. Making your results visible helps them answer accurately, a future-focused performance review turns the answer into a plan, and over time you can shape your job content toward the skills you want to grow. Knowing what is already strong is the natural place to begin, and the free Job Skills Test lets you [find your strongest workplace skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), these three included, across **a set of twelve that all improve with practice**. That tells you what to build on before you decide which gaps to work on. ## What you already have to work with You may find that parts of this are already happening, just without names attached. If a manager or teacher has ever handed you the task nobody else wanted because they knew you would finish it, that is a self-management skill with its evidence already in place. The list you can write today is a starting point, not a fixed picture of you: each entry can grow with practice, you decide which ones to take further, and none of it asks you to become someone else. A vague answer to "What can you do?" tends to cost more as applications and reviews get more specific, and a sharper one is within reach once you know where you stand. ## Start from where you actually are From here, one step remains: replacing guesswork with a starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. It takes 7 minutes, covers all twelve, and shows where you stand today and which skills would make the biggest difference to what you want to do next. ## 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? How to take stock of your current skills: sort them into three types, rate your real level, find evidence for each, and decide which gaps are worth closing. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Setting Goals, Working with Your Manager. ### 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/working-with-your-manager.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/current-skills/ Preferred summary: "How to take stock of your current skills: sort them into three types, rate your real level, find evidence for each, and decide which gaps are worth closing." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.