During tight economic conditions and an ever-competitive work environment, finding a job is not a walk in the park.

Recruiters receive hundreds or even thousands of CVs for a single open job opening. Not only is the competition high, but there is a lot of processing to be done by the employers.

In a situation like this, you really need to go extra to stand out from the crowd and increase your chances of landing a job or going for an interview.

However, you need more than a sparkling CV to succeed in the current job marketplace. In an oversaturated market, employers don’t care as much about candidates’ hard skills as their soft skills.

How can you determine the soft skills that you are missing, and how can you develop them?

To achieve the above, this article will inform you about the Career Skills Test developed by the Career Skills European project.

But before finding out more about the test and how you can use it, let’s see the Career Skills project.

What is the Career Skills Project

Career Skills is an Erasmus+ EU-funded project that iED has been a partner of since its inception in 2019.

The ambitious objective of the Career Skills project is to provide an online one-stop shop for users, policy actors, and practitioners of career assistance throughout Europe.

Finding a job in a fast-transitioning world is hard. Demand for skills changes at a breakneck pace, and especially NEETs fall behind.

Career Skills wants to create a common point of reference for job candidates, career guidance practitioners, and stakeholders (e.g. policymakers). This reference point seeks to help candidates improve their skills and find a suitable career.

It is important to engage career guidance practitioners since they are responsible for upskilling and reskilling. And the stakeholders to have a better understanding of the career management skills in society.

To achieve the above, the Career Skills Project has come up with innovative results to improve the career management skills of candidates.

Let’s look at the career skills test candidates can use to determine their skills. And then, we’ll show you the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) they can use to learn that are missing.

Evaluate your career skills

First, let’s just mention that the Career Skills project identifies 12 career management skills described in its catalogue. These are:

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

To learn more about these career management skills, you can see here.

The above career management skills are those that we, at the Career Skills project, determined essential to have in the modern workplace. For this reason, we created a career skills test, a free assessment tool everyone can use to determine their skills.

It is in the form of a questionnaire consisting of 36 statements addressing the 12 career skills above. Users can determine if they have or lack specific skills by reading the statements and indicating the extent to which each refers to them.

Upskill using the MOOC

Having determined the degree you have or lack of those career skills, it is time to do something about it.

The thoughtful design of the Career Skills platform and the project’s results make it easy for users to start learning to cover their skills gap immediately.

All they need to do is, after receiving the detailed report on their career skills, to register on this platform. In there, they can short theoretical tips with practical tasks, reflection exercises, examples, cases, quizzes, and inspiring resources that can help them improve their career skills.

Also, they can start with the level that corresponds to their proficiency or go through the whole module.

Having completed the module of your choice, you can repeat the career skills test to check your progress.

We wish you all the best in all your current and future job-seeking endeavours. We hope that our Career Skills test and accompanying MOOC will prove useful in improving your career.

You can find more about Career Skills EU project at the following link.