Do you really understand how to best get your job done or get along with people at your work? Your professional career and personal development hinges on understanding your strengths and weaknesses. Until you really understand just how important they are to the things you do (and how well you do them!), you won’t take the topic seriously.
Success starts early… don’t spend it all on cloths, though.
I took a survey of several hundred people over the topic of professional and personal aptitudes related to several different topics. The results are at the same time sobering, challenging, and enlightening. Below is one of the questions I asked them and is followed by the unfiltered results.
Question:
Explain why finding your work-related strengths and weaknesses is important.
Answers:
- This is important information for a manager as they need to evaluate your skills. Finding your work related strengths and weaknesses helps you get placed in a proper position.
- Once you know you have a strength, you can put it to work for yourself by using it to pursue projects where you can prove yourself and build a strong record of success. Operating within your areas of strength allows you to focus your energy on work that will give you the best outcomes for your effort. (As willpower and decision-making have been shown to be limited resources, it’s important to use them for maximum benefit!)Similarly, knowing what your weakness is gives you a change to minimize the tasks you do within that area, and look for ways to pair it with your strengths. Identifying an area of weakness also gives you an opportunity to look for ways to improve in that area, through practice, study, or mentorship, during times that are less crucial for project implementation. By working on weaker skills during “safer” parts of a project at work or on your personal time outside of the job, mistakes are less likely to jeopardize your status at work before you reach full proficiency.
- If you don’t know your strengths and weaknesses while doing your job, you won’t get far. You need to know what you can do and what you simply can’t. If you let others know your strengths and weaknesses as well, they will be able to help do things that you might not be able to. If you know that you’re good at writing reports, but not good at presentations, it would be good for you to write everything up and have a co-worker give the presentation.
- If you know your work-related strengths and weaknesses you can develop your weaknesses into strengths, and play your strengths to your advantage. If you know these things, you are likely to become a better work as you gain more experience in the work field and develop these aspects of yourself.
- If given in a respectful manner, we all need to know our weaknesses so we can improve upon them. No one is perfect, but we all want to be seen as a valued employee. We also need to know our strengths so we can use them to better the workplace as a whole. Maybe we have strengths that we don’t realize, and a supervisor or colleague can let us know that those qualities are valued and needed, and that would make us use those characteristics more.
- It is important to know what you are good at since that is where you need to drive yourself towards in your career. If you are good at something and you know it, it is an opportunity for you to excel professionally but to do that you need to understand what you are good at and what you need to stay away from. Finding your strengths and weaknesses can help you grow in your career and create a path to success.
- This is important to me because it will give me the ability to measure my progress. I would be able to see if I am failing or succeeding with a certain task or job. I would then be able to gauge how successful I would be in that situation.
- If you know your work related strengths you can leverage them to help work more effectively or choose a field of employment that would suit you best. If you know your weaknesses you can work on improving them or seek help when you need to.
- It is important to know your work related strengths and weaknesses so that you can work to your full potential. Some employers will pay you more or give you a bonus if you know more then what is on the surface of certain subjects like the rest of your colleagues. It is great to learn new skills that may seem not so useful now but will be very helpful later within your career. Most people I now within technology based careers have to learn different skills later on to keep up with change and growth of technology.
- Finding work-related strengths and weaknesses is important because you must know what you’re not good at to avoid making mistakes with those weaknesses. Knowing what you’re strong at allows you to work on tasks related to your strengths for maximum efficiency.
- When you know where your strengths and weaknesses are you can find a job where you can run with the strengths and minimize the weaknesses. Sometimes your weakness can come from lack of experience or knowledge so practicing or learning from someone that, that specific skill excels in can help you learn how to strengthen it. When you are strong in an area and you do well with it you can find greater self confidence to try new things even areas you are not very strong in because you know you are not a failure.
- I like to do well because I like praise. I like to improve my weakness to do better to get a better job or raise. I am a hard worker, but not mechanical at all. I need to pursue learning mechanics.
- You are not going to understand what will be a successful career for yourself if you don’t know what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at. You want to be able to find something that meshes with the things you do well, while exposing the least amount of things that you don’t do very well. This will also help you when you’re taking on work items. You can avoid what won’t turn out well and take on the things you’ll do great at.
- Finding your strengths and weaknesses at your job is very critical in moving forward. When you find something you are really good at, perhaps you can move to an area where you can really show that aspect of your work. Weaknesses aren’t exactly a bad thing. It’s just pointing out something you need work on. When you work on it enough, you can come out of it a better person and worker.
- Finding your work related strengths and weaknesses in important because it will let you know what you need to work on to do your job better. Say that you can work very fast, but your work contains a lot of mistakes. That will tell you that you need to work on your attention to detail, so that your work is more efficient.
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Can you identify with or find a nugget of awesome from these heart-felt responses? Have a story or piece of advice of your own? Please share with us in the comments below. Thanks for reading!
Want to discover more about your own strengths and weaknesses, and turn them into ways to get more our of your life? Find your strengths through this comprehensive test, find out what makes you tick, and take actionable steps to start living live with more purpose. Click here to find your strengths today.
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