The fourth industrial revolution has brought so many workplace changes that employees need to develop their career management skills. Those skills are vital to allow them to navigate their lives and careers in these turbulent times safely. So, what are these competencies, and what makes them so important?

The Career Management Skills and their Importance

Many years ago, a lot of people maintained the same job for most of their working lives. They would frequently join an employer that would remain loyal to and grow professionally in the same setting for years.

However, this is not the case anymore. Nowadays, there is more work flexibility, there is constant change, while opportunities are in abundance. Therefore, the modern employee has lots of room for a tailored, meaningful, and fulfilling career.

To achieve that, people need to cultivate those skills that enable them to make the right decisions in managing their careers. The so-called career management skills are the following:

• Self-awareness
• Labour market awareness
• Employability
• Career planning
• Resilience
• Curiosity and inquisitiveness
• Problem-solving
• Creativity
• Self-employment skills
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Leadership

The Importance of Self-Evaluation

To begin, those career management skills are not definitive, and as years pass by, more may join this list or be excluded. However, it doesn’t mean that a person needs to have all these competencies at once to be successful. In addition, each skill affects an individual’s career life differently, and people need to identify which ones they possess and which not and to what degree.

Furthermore, there are a lot of assessment tools that serve this purpose. The idea is that individuals who identify the skills that they are missing will work on them and improve them. There are many coaches, mentors, and VET trainers with specialized knowledge that can help those individuals acquire those skills.

The Online Assessment Tool

There is this online assessment tool to understand the need for the self-evaluation of individuals on career management skills. This tool consists of 36 statements that describe the 12 career skills that were mentioned earlier. Individuals taking the test will receive a personalized report with the level of these competencies. Moreover, based on those results, the tool will refer those individuals to useful national resources and career management skills MOOC.

The online assessment tool was developed during the works of the Erasmus+ Career Skills Project. It is the result of a multinational consortium comprised of six experienced partners with expertise in career guidance. Namely, the coordinator is the Business Foundation for Education from Bulgaria, The University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, Aspire-Igen group from the UK, VHS Cham from Germany, The Institute of Entrepreneurship Development from Greece, Réseau International des Cités des Métiers des Cites des Metiers from France.

To learn more about the Assessment Tool, click here.

Make sure to click here to stay up to date with Career Skills Project and its initiatives.