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Assessing Your Skills After a Job Loss

Recognize your own blend of abilities and communicate them to market yourself to potential employers.

Why Think About Skills?

After a layoff, your top priority may be to job search immediately. But you'll be more successful if you start by thinking about your skills. It may also help you see where you need to upgrade your skills with more education and training.

Transferable Skills

If you've been laid off, you may need to switch careers. Learn how your skills can transfer to new industries or occupations. Transferable skills are general skills. They include things like:

  • Math and computation skills
  • Reading and writing
  • Speaking ability
  • Science skills
  • Critical thinking
  • Management skills
  • Technical skills
  • Repair, maintenance, and troubleshooting skills
  • Computer and technical skills
  • Communication, persuasion, or coordination skills

If you've been a fast food restaurant manager, can you jump right into being a hotel manager? Maybe. The key is to figure out which skills will be most valued by a prospective employer. Then learn know how to market yourself. See the skill and ability videos for more details.

Assess Yourself

Learn more about your personal skill set by taking a self-assessment. Take several to learn as much as you can about your skills and the jobs that match them. Different assessments tell you something a little different about yourself.

  • Use CareerOneStop's Skills Matcher to find occupations that use skills similar to your previous job. You can also create a list of your skills and match them to job types that need those skills.
  • Try the O*NET Skills Search. Select skills from a list, and then view occupations that use those skills.
  • Are you realistic, investigative, enterprising, conventional, social, or artistic? Use our Interest Assessment to find out how your interests relate to occupations and majors.
  • Is it more important to you to develop relationships or work independently? Do you care more about having a supportive supervisor or good working conditions? Use the Work Values Matcher to learn which occupations are the best match for what you value at work.
  • The MnCareers Interest Assessment is based on Holland's Interest Inventory. It will match your interests to various career areas.

Get More Help

Need more help connecting your skills to the workplace? Professionals at CareerForce are available to help.