Cognitive Abilities and Personality Traits are Part of your Skills Story

Episode Transcript

Sari: The Skill: Emotional Intelligence and Social Capital are two skills that you should consistently work on strengthening to not only improve your hire-ability, but your quality of life in general!

Sari: Got Skills? Of course, you do! But can you talk about the skills you have and how you use them? Whether it’s with your cousin, your potential new boss, or the mentor who has 20+ years in your dream role, skills talk is hard, but it doesn’t have to be.

Michelle: As a spinoff to the Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby Podcast, each week on Got Skills the Skills Baby team is taking a deep dive into a key takeaway from an episode of the podcast, focused on actionable ways for professionals to Skill Up.

Sari: I’m your host, Sari Weinerman and with me is Michelle Smith. We’re here to help you breeze through the next family reunion, interview, or mentorship opportunity by better understanding the skills you have and how to talk about them!

M: This week, we’re diving into Season 1 Episode 9 of Let’s Talk About Skills Baby. In this episode Kelly speaks with Denise Leaser, President of Great Biz Tools about the skills and competencies-based platform they created to match jobseekers with the jobs they were born to do. 

S: The platform is called My Inner Genius, and is an assessment tool for identifying a person’s innate strengths. Denise explains that what they are not assessing is knowledge. Knowledge can always be learned and added in to supplement someone’s innate strengths. Rather they are assessing innate cognitive skills, abilities, and personality traits. 

 M: Yes, she explains this with a few examples, she says;

 D: it’s not just interests, but it’s also your innate cognitive skills, abilities, and personality traits. Do your innate competencies align with those roles? And if so, which role? So we even narrow it down to, cyber security is a little bit different when it comes to your innate abilities. Again, we’re not talking about knowledge here. So cybersecurity is a little bit different. You have to have a higher level of integrity and different things like that. Data science, you need to have a higher level of numeric, fluency and problem solving. Customer service, you need to have a higher level of empathy, right?

 S: I love these examples because they are great catalysts for helping anyone listening to this identify the other innate abilities or personality traits that make them unique. Don’t forget, these are all skills that should be added to your Skills Story. 

 M: That makes so much sense, and is really interesting to think about, because job postings and wanted ads almost exclusively lead with knowledge-based competencies over innate personality traits. However, 9 times out of 10 they are NOT the most important requirements, because at the end of the day, they can, and will, be taught. Whereas things like integrity and empathy cannot be easily taught. 

 S: Right, and not only that, on the job requirements are changing all the time because jobs themselves are changing all the time. New technology or new policies and procedures will always dictate changes that employees will have to learn and relearn. So, at the end of the day, those skills really aren’t the most important, it’s the resilience and malleability of the candidate that will dictate their long-term success and guide their career path from one job to the next. Denise talks about this in more detail, she says;

 D: Because you have a history in retail doesn’t mean that you always need to stay there. You already had skills and abilities going into retail, and then you gained some more while you’re there, but those can be used in many different careers, many different ways.

 And I think that’s one of the problems that has created a lot of the bias in the hiring process are things like looking at resumes, which we know have a lot of bias built in. Everything from somebody’s name, where they went to school, if they went to school, what their job experience is, where they live, those are all things that can add bias to the process.

 And then resumes also have inaccurate information. People either over report what they’ve done or the significance of it or under report. So, it’s both ways, cause people don’t know how to communicate to an employer, what my skill set is. So, they may be focusing on the wrong things and their resume, and the employer may be focusing on the wrong things and they’re passing each other and it really would be a good match.

 One of the things we’re doing is saying let’s not focus on the old ways, the old paradigms that have all this bias. Let’s look at new ways. Let’s look at people’s potential. And that means that as jobs change, we’re not focused on jobs. And that’s one of the things that needs to change in businesses when you’re focused on jobs, when that job changes or that job goes away, then you have to completely retool.

 But when you’re focused on capabilities, then you’re saying, “okay, this job is changing, but the capabilities really haven’t changed.” It’s easy to pivot into that, or maybe the capabilities change slightly,

M: Wow. Let’s move our focus away from jobs and onto capabilities. Honestly, that could be our new tagline for the podcast because it so beautifully sums up our mission to help our listeners uncover the innate skills they have honed through their past experiences that will enrich their personal narratives and make them easier to understand, more hire-able, and better able to network. 

S: Yes. The more we can learn to focus on what we are capable of, in favor of trying to measure ourselves up to an arbitrary requirement of knowledge, the better we can contribute those capabilities and find the opportunities that are truly meant for us.  

M: I love that, and think it is a great way to close this episode. No one else, anywhere in the world, has the exact innate skills, abilities and personality traits as you. So, you have to make sure you capture those details when you talk about what you do, and why you’re good at it. 

S: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Got Skills. The podcast where we explore how to understand the skills you’ve got, and more importantly, how to talk about them. Got Skills is a Growth Network Podcasts production. “To learn more about the hosts of Got Skills head to skillsbaby.com/gotskills. Find out what we’re up to, the latest news in the skills world, and what events are coming up that you should keep an eye on! Last but not least, make sure to follow Growth Network Podcasts on LinkedIn for more awesome shows to add to your podcast feed. We’ll see you next time on Got Skills.”