How To Assess Where Your Skills Could Provide The Most "Career Yield"

We all work because bills have to be paid and life has to be funded somehow. It's a simple transaction we make with the world, trading our time and effort for the security of a monthly paycheck, but feeling like a spare part in a machine is no fun for anyone, and spending forty hours a week in a role where your well-curated talents are ignored can make you feel quite dissatisfied after no time at all.

If you’re going through this, remember that it's natural to want to feel useful, and to know your contribution is changing the outcome of the day or at least working towards it. If you feel unfulfilled in your career, it’s good to ask if this is the reason.

Now, finding a sweet spot where your abilities match the work can take years to achieve and it depends on what you do, as the job market is noisy, and hard work isn’t always glamorous or going to be showering you with rewards on a constant basis. If you’re mindful, you can begin assessing where you fit best, but it does require a bit of honesty and a willingness to look at your career history and where you hope to go.

In this post, we’ll aim to help you get started on this journey. Let’s explore how to even assess where your skills could do the most good going forward.

Think About Your Daily Frustrations

It’s frustrating that our natural troubleshooting minds are often more focused on the bad than the good, but you can leverage that to figure out where career improvement could come. Looking back at your last few roles and pinpointing the moments of highest stress is a good way to start, as if sitting in endless planning meetings made you want to scream, then a role focused on strategy is likely a bad fit.

In some cases, you may find that skills you lack or simply dislike using are pointing you in a new direction. Avoiding roles that center on these tasks could be better if happiness is a goal you want to focus on, and it's much better to focus on the days that flew by as a result, because those are the clues to where your working focus wants to be.

Look For Niche Specialists

General job boards can feel rife with competition, and they are, especially now many are plagued with AI applications and postings. Moreover, if you work in a highly regulated or niche sector, generalist recruiters won't understand the value you bring and you might think that the offers you’re trying to pursue aren’t exactly what you need right now.

For instance, if legal work is your trade, speaking to experts like Origin Legal is a way to have your skills assessed by people who know the difference between corporate and criminal law, and being understood by the person hiring you is the first step to finding a role where you can do good work.

Ask Former Colleagues

In general, we’re all terrible judges of our own abilities. Asking the people who worked beside you is a way to get an objective view of your strengths and what they found easiest or hardest to work with you on, as they saw you on the bad days and the good days, so their perspective is a little more grounded.

With this advice, we hope you can more easily assess where your skills can give you the best career yield, and plug the gaps where appropriate.