# Skills About Yourself: 6 Steps to Find Them and Put Them Into Words Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-about-yourself/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-about-yourself.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 the skills about yourself in six steps: list your experiences, pull skills from tasks, back each with an example, check others' view, and match the role. ## Key facts - Title: Skills About Yourself: 6 Steps to Find Them and Put Them Into Words - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Building Confidence, Setting Goals - Primary keyword: skills about yourself - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-about-yourself/ ## What this page covers - Find the skills about yourself in six steps: list your experiences, pull skills from tasks, back each with an example, check others' view, and match the role. - Practical guidance for skills about yourself - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation The skills about yourself worth naming are the ones you can back with something you actually did. To find them, list your experiences, pull the skills out of the tasks, attach an example to each, check your view against other people's, keep the five to ten that describe you best, and match those to the role. A blank "skills" box on an application, or an interviewer leaning back and saying "tell me about yourself," can make it feel as if you have nothing to offer. Usually you have plenty; it just hasn't been sorted into words yet. The steps below do that sorting, and one of them, the one that's easiest to skip, is what makes everything else believable. ## How to identify the skills about yourself, step by step Being able to name your skills is not a nice extra. The University of Helsinki's guidance for students says the ability to identify and describe your skills has a major impact on your employment prospects, and the reason is simple: an employer can only weigh what you put into words and back up. So the work below is less about gaining new skills than about making the ones you already have visible. The steps build on each other. The first five are done privately, once, before you write anything for an employer. The last one you repeat for every application. ### 1. Take a full inventory of your experiences Start on paper, not in your head. Make a simple table: every job, course, project and activity down one side, and next to each, what you were responsible for. Include the things that don't feel like "experience." The University of Edinburgh's career service counts part-time work, caring responsibilities, volunteering, student clubs, personal interests and internships as [places where skills are built](/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills/), and with good reason: they ask for the same things a workplace does. You deal with people, juggle your time, and carry responsibility when something goes wrong. So the weekend café shift goes in. So does picking up a younger brother from school every afternoon during exam season, and being the club member who always ends up booking the venue. The common mistake at this stage is deciding an experience is "not relevant" before you have looked at what it involved. Write everything down first; judge it later. ### 2. Pull the skills out of what you did Now work from the table, not from memory. CareerOneStop, the U.S. Department of Labor's career site, suggests listing the key tasks from each experience and highlighting the action words. The verbs are where the skills sit, because they describe what you actually did rather than what your job title said. "Trained two new hires on the register" points to communication: explaining a process and checking that it landed. "Rebuilt the weekend schedule when three people quit" points to time management and decision-making. Academic work breaks down the same way. A thesis is not one skill but several: planning work across months (time management), deciding what to cut (decision-making), and defending your argument to a supervisor who isn't convinced (communication). Some verbs will point to technical skills instead, such as a software tool, a lab method or a language, and those belong on the list too. Write each skill next to the task it came from. You will need that link in the next step. ### 3. Back every skill with an example This is the step that turns a list into something people believe. The Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences puts the rule bluntly in its skills worksheet: don't list skills or personal qualities you cannot demonstrate. Its exercise uses three columns: a challenge you faced, how you handled it, and the skills that handling shows. Filled in, it looks like this: - Challenge: a group presentation due in two days, and one member had dropped out. - What you did: split his section among the remaining three, set a check-in for the next evening, and ran one full rehearsal. - What it shows: time management, teamwork and communication, each with a moment you can describe. This is also where you separate skills from personality. "Hard-working," "friendly" and "a people person" describe what you are like, and anyone can claim them. A skill is something you can show you did. That distinction matters for more than credibility: what you did is behavior, and behavior can be practiced and improved, so describing yourself this way also shows you where you can grow. If a quality on your list has no example behind it, either find one or let it go. ### 4. Check your view against other people's Your own view has a blind spot built in. Skills that come easily tend to feel unremarkable to the person who has them, so you are likely to undersell exactly the things others value most. And how you see yourself and how you come across don't always match. Deal with both by asking two or three people who have seen you work, such as a supervisor, a teammate, or a classmate from a long project, [one specific question](/knowledge/self-awareness/questions-to-ask-for-feedback/): what would they miss if you weren't on the team? Then collect what people have already said. The University of Sydney's career guidance recommends gathering evidence of your achievements and outcomes, including positive comments from supervisors, peers and customers, and keeping it together in a portfolio. A line from a reference, a manager's note in a review, a thank-you email from a customer: these are evidence you didn't write yourself, which makes them far easier to use than your own praise. Where other people name something you missed, add it. Where you list something nobody mentions, look harder for the example. And if the people around you are few, or kinder than they are specific, the free Job Skills Test offers [a structured second opinion](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/): seven minutes, and you have a result to set against your own list. ### 5. Narrow it to the five to ten that describe you best By now the list is long, and a long list of labels says less about you than a short one with substance. Before cutting, rate yourself honestly. The University of Western Ontario frames its own skills assessment this way: it is not a test, it is for your own learning, and nobody else sees the results. Treat your rating the same way. No one is grading this, so there is no reason to inflate the strong points or hide the weak ones. Then ask three questions of each skill. How do you go about it: does it come with a certain ease, even when the task is hard? How does it feel while you're doing it: absorbing or draining? What has it produced: a result that someone else noticed or relied on? The skills that pass all three are strengths, not just things you have done often. A University of Helsinki exercise asks students to choose about five to ten skills, strengths or qualities that describe them best, and then to describe each in more detail. That is the right size. Keep the rest on a second list of [areas to grow](/knowledge/types-of-skills/skill-seeker/). It isn't a list of failings; it shows where practice will pay off. ### 6. Match the list to the role and say it out loud The shortlist is not the final answer; it is the stock you draw from. For each application, hold it up against what the role asks for. The overlap tells you which two or three skills to lead with, and the gaps tell you what to build or how to frame what you have. The comparison also says something about fit. A role that leans almost entirely on your second list may still be worth applying for, but you will go in knowing what it will ask of you. Then say it, out loud, with the examples attached. Sydney's career guidance notes that this preparation is what helps you perform well in [behavioral interviews](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/job-skills-for-interview/), where you are asked to describe what you have done rather than what you are like. A good answer to "tell me about yourself" is two or three of your shortlisted skills, each with one concrete example, in a few sentences. That looks easy on paper and feels very different the first time you say it. > As a student you're used to doing everything in writing. There were whole words I knew but had never said out loud — I would pronounce things wrong. Practicing talking about your discipline out loud, what you bring, how you'd approach things — I wish I had started that with fellow students. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and her advice is worth taking literally: run your examples past a friend before you run them past an interviewer. ## The skills underneath knowing what you're good at Go back over the six steps and notice what they actually asked of you. Not a talent for self-promotion, but three habits: looking at yourself honestly, deciding what the list is for, and standing behind it once it's written. **Building Self-Awareness** is what steps three to five run on. It means noticing which tasks you handle well, how they feel while you do them, and what they produce, then asking for feedback that is specific and points forward rather than fishing for reassurance. That is how a genuine strength separates from something you've simply done many times. Nothing about it is fixed: the more attention you pay to your own work, the sharper the picture gets. **Setting Goals** is what gives the list a purpose. Once you can see your strengths zone and what you need from work, whether that's security, people around you, or room to express yourself, you can judge which roles would use what you have, and spend your effort growing strengths instead of patching every weakness. Keep the horizon short: the next role will reveal skills you can't see yet. **Building Confidence** is what lets you say the list without shrinking it. Confidence at work grows from accumulated evidence of competence, so every example you wrote down in step three counts as proof rather than boasting. Claiming your skills out loud can feel uncomfortable at first, and it doesn't have to stop feeling that way before you do it. Saying the examples, plainly and specifically, is what makes them start to sound like facts. Finding the right words is easier with a measure to work from. The free Job Skills Test [names your strongest work skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), scoring you on these three and on the **wider set they belong to**, so the language you use about yourself rests on something firmer than a guess. Where a skill scores low, you have found something to build, not a fixed limit. ## Where your list already starts Some of this may already be happening without a name attached. If a manager has left you to close up alone, or a classmate has asked you to explain something the professor couldn't, that is an entry for step three waiting to be written down. The skills on your second list aren't verdicts either; they're mostly the ones you haven't had much reason to practice yet, and you can build them without becoming someone else. Being able to say what you bring counts for more each time the decision gets bigger, from a first job to a change of field, and the sorting gets quicker every time you do it. What helps now is an outside measure of where you stand. ## Start with an outside measure The only thing left is to get that measure. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: it takes 7 minutes and shows where you stand across all twelve, and which of them would make the biggest difference for the roles you're going after. Then, the next time someone asks you to describe yourself, you'll be choosing from evidence rather than reaching for words. ## 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 the skills about yourself in six steps: list your experiences, pull skills from tasks, back each with an example, check others' view, and match the role. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Building Confidence, Setting Goals. ### 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/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals.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/skills-about-yourself/ Preferred summary: "Find the skills about yourself in six steps: list your experiences, pull skills from tasks, back each with an example, check others' view, and match the role." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.