# How to Find Skills You Already Have (and Know Which Ones to Build) Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/find-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/find-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 Find skills hidden in your jobs, projects and classes: mine your experience, ask others, use employer vocabulary, and compare your list with the roles you want. ## Key facts - Title: How to Find Skills You Already Have (and Know Which Ones to Build) - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Setting Goals, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: find skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/find-skills/ ## What this page covers - Find skills hidden in your jobs, projects and classes: mine your experience, ask others, use employer vocabulary, and compare your list with the roles you want. - Practical guidance for find skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation The most reliable way to find skills you already have is to start with what you've done (jobs, projects, coursework, clubs) and ask what each one required of you and what came out of it. Then check that list against how other people see you and against what the roles you want actually require. If an application form or an interviewer has asked you to name your skills and your mind went blank, that rarely means there is nothing to find. Skills show up as evidence, not as labels, and ordinary experience usually just hasn't been translated yet. Each of the methods below catches something the others miss, including the strengths you're least likely to spot on your own. ## 8 ways to find skills you already have Work through them roughly in this order: the first three build your raw list, the middle three give it a vocabulary and a reality check, and the last two tell you which skills to take forward. ### 1. Mine your past experiences Penn Career Services advises starting a skills inventory with your previous jobs, projects and activities rather than with a list of skill words. The reason is simple: skills rarely appear as labels. They appear as things you did and results you produced, so reconstructing real situations surfaces abilities you have never thought to name. Pick four or five experiences, and don't filter for impressive ones: a weekend job, a group assignment, a club you helped run, a stretch of volunteering. For each, write down what you were responsible for, what you actually did when it got busy or went wrong, and what came out of it. A shift where you calmed an upset customer and kept the line moving is not "just a job." It is evidence. Then separate what you did from what you are good at. Not every task you have handled is a strength. The ones that are tend to share three signs: you did them well, often with less effort than others needed; they gave you energy rather than draining it; and the result got noticed. That distinction is what makes a skill credible when you say it out loud, because it arrives with an example attached. ### 2. Look for transferable skills, not only technical ones Skills come in two broad kinds. Technical skills are tied to a job or field: a piece of software, a lab method, a bookkeeping system. Transferable skills carry from one role to the next, such as communicating clearly or managing your time across competing deadlines. The transferable ones are the easiest to overlook, because they are learned informally and come with no certificate or grade to point to. Nobody hands you a diploma for keeping a five-person project on schedule. Yet these are exactly the skills that make [experience from an unrelated job](/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills/) relevant to the next one, so give them their own place on your list. ### 3. Ask other people what they see Your view of yourself has a built-in gap. Strengths that come easily feel unremarkable to the person who has them, so they sit in a blind spot that a supervisor, teammate or classmate can see perfectly well. Ask three or four people who have watched you work for something specific: a moment they saw you at your best, or the kind of task they would hand to you first. Then compare their answers with your own list. Where the two overlap, you have a skill you can claim with confidence. Where they name something you missed, you have found a strength in your blind spot. Where you list something nobody mentions, treat it as a hypothesis to test. Feedback used this way isn't criticism to brace for; it's one of the fastest routes to an accurate list. ### 4. Treat assessments as a hypothesis Walden University Career Services points to tools such as SkillScan and StrengthsFinder for identifying skills and strengths. Their value is structure: a fixed vocabulary and a place to begin when a blank page won't fill itself. Their limit is that a result is a starting hypothesis, not a verdict. A label from a test only becomes a skill once you can match it to something you have actually done, using what you gathered with the first three methods. The same logic applies to our free Job Skills Test: in seven minutes it [rates your work skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) from the outside, and you can hold the result up against your own list and against what other people told you. Where all three agree, you're on solid ground; where they disagree, you know exactly where to look more closely. ### 5. Borrow the vocabulary employers use Once you have evidence, you need words that people on the hiring side recognize. NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, defines eight [career readiness competencies](/knowledge/skills-standards/nace-competencies/), among them communication, teamwork, professionalism, and career and self-development, and publishes a professional skills self-reflection worksheet and a competency assessment tool for students. A framework like this is most useful as a translation key rather than a checklist. "Kept the club's events running when two organizers dropped out" becomes evidence of teamwork; "rewrote the group's instructions so everyone could follow them" becomes evidence of communication. Same experience, now in terms an employer or career adviser reads the way you intend. ### 6. Run your skills through a matcher CareerOneStop's Skills Matcher, a free tool sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, asks you to rate your level on 40 workplace skills and returns a list of occupations that match your ratings. It works in the opposite direction from a job ad: instead of telling you what a role demands, it starts from what you can do and shows where that is used. That makes it useful when you can name your skills but can't yet see where they point. One caution: a self-rating is only as good as the evidence behind it, so the matcher works best after the first three methods, not instead of them. ### 7. Compare your list with the role you want University of Iowa Human Resources treats comparing your current skills with what your next role requires as an important part of career progression. The comparison is what turns a loose list into a map. Take a description of a role you would actually want next. List the skills it asks for and rate yourself on each: strong, with an example ready; partly there; or not yet. The result shows what you already have, [what needs building](/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-development-plan/), and which gaps matter most for that particular role, so you can pick one or two skills to develop next instead of trying to improve everything at once. Keep the horizon to the next role or the next year rather than a ten-year plan; your strengths are still emerging, and each new job will show you more of them. The worry underneath this is often less about skills than about fit. If you've ever feared ending up somewhere that is either over your head or beneath you, you're not alone. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described it like this: > I would really hate to end up in a situation where the expectations of me are far too high compared with what I can deliver, so I actually break my neck on it. > > On the other hand, I also don't want to end up where the expectations are so low that I'm bored out of my mind and end up losing all the skills I've built up, because I'm just sitting there correcting spreadsheets or whatever deadly boring tasks you can expect out there. > > What I would like is a compass: how do I navigate the jungle of job offers, so I end up somewhere where my abilities match the tasks in front of me — where I'm in flow, think it's fun, and can develop? A skills list held up against real role requirements is that compass. It won't make the choice for you, but it shows which roles would stretch you, which would stall you, and which sit in between. ### 8. Check skills against what you want to keep doing Career centers commonly pair skills assessment with [interest assessment](/knowledge/setting-goals/how-to-find-your-interests/); The Cooper Union's career services, for example, offer the Strong Interest Inventory alongside their other self-assessments. The pairing exists for a reason: skills describe what you can do, while interests describe what you'll want to keep doing. A skill you're good at but dislike using is a weak foundation for a career choice. So go back to your list and circle the skills that also give you energy when you use them. Those are where your effort pays off most. The ones you're good at but would rather not use every day are still worth knowing about, just not worth building your next move around. ## The skills that make your strengths easier to see Look back over the eight methods and a pattern shows through. Each one is a way of getting honest information about yourself, deciding what to do with it, and trusting the evidence enough to act on it. Those are habits more than techniques, and habits respond to practice. **Building Self-Awareness** is what separates what you're naturally good at from what you've simply done. It means noticing how you work when a task goes well, how that task makes you feel, and what results it produces, then using feedback from others to catch the strengths you can't see from the inside. Done well, it turns "I don't know what I'm good at" into a short list of named strengths, each with an example behind it, rather than a type label from a quiz. **Setting Goals** is what turns the list into a direction. Once you know your strengths zone and what matters to you in work, you can choose roles and tasks that play to them instead of chasing whatever sounds impressive, and spend less energy patching weaknesses. It works best on short horizons: treat the next role as an experiment that will reveal skills you can't yet see, not as a step in a fixed plan. **Building Confidence** is what lets you believe the list. Confidence at work grows from accumulated evidence of competence, not from a feeling you have to summon first, so every task you've handled, however small, counts as proof. Finding your skills is partly collecting that proof. For the gaps, the same logic holds: small, manageable challenges build the next skill faster than waiting until you feel ready. If you'd like to know which of these three is your strongest and which deserves your effort first, the free Job Skills Test [pinpoints where to focus](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), covering these three among **twelve that matter in nearly every kind of role**. Every one of them is learnable, so a low score simply marks where practice will pay off soonest. ## What you already have to work with You may recognize some of this in how you already operate. If you're the one friends ask to look over their applications, or the one a group project quietly depended on to hit its deadline, that pattern is the kind of evidence this whole process runs on. None of it is fixed: the skills that feel thin today are mostly the ones you haven't had much reason to practice yet, and you can build them without turning into someone else. Knowing what you bring tends to carry more weight as the choices get bigger, from which roles to apply for to which projects to volunteer for, and a first picture takes very little time to start. What helps most now is a reference point you don't have to invent yourself. ## Get a first map of your skills All that remains is picking up that reference 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 and which ones would make the biggest difference for the roles you're aiming at. Set the result beside the list you've built, and you'll know which skills to name with confidence and which to build 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? Find skills hidden in your jobs, projects and classes: mine your experience, ask others, use employer vocabulary, and compare your list with the roles you want. ### 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/find-skills/ Preferred summary: "Find skills hidden in your jobs, projects and classes: mine your experience, ask others, use employer vocabulary, and compare your list with the roles you want." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.