Personal SWOT analysis is a great self-assessment tool to assess yourself in order to plan your career. The tricky part is finding a job you love that matches your skill set and of course pays well. SWOT Analysis helps in finding the solution to this problem also.
SWOT Analysis is the process of examining your Strengths and Weaknesses, and also Opportunities and Threats.
You can use SWOT Analysis to assess yourself, compare yourself to your peers, and also use it to find career growth opportunities.
How to do personal SWOT Analysis
1) Strengths
The first step is to identify and list down your strengths. This will help you to be more confident and making decisions for outperforming the weakness and threats and groping the opportunities.
Following questions to be asked by yourself will help you to identify your strengths,
1) What are the professional qualifications/certifications you have that make you stand out of the queue?
2) Do you have expertise in some areas that can make a difference?
3) Do you have influential and powerful contact?
4) How are your communication skills?
5) How many languages can you speak?
6) Do you have an adaptive nature or not?
7) What do others think of your strengths?
For strength it is very crucial to know what makes you different from others.
2) Weaknesses
The second step is to identify your weaknesses. The purpose of SWOT analysis to the individuals is to assess and improve themselves and identifying weaknesses is a step towards improving them.
If you already encountered your weaknesses then you can pay attention and time to improve them and prepare yourself for future challenges.
Ask yourself these questions to identify your weaknesses and remember, be honest and realistic when answering these questions. After all, it’s a self-assessment that can be seen by only you.
1) Do you have the necessary skills or qualifications to be successful in your field?
2) Do you have any bad habits such as getting late, poor communication skills, etc.
3) Do you have enough confidence to face interviews and meetings?
4) Do you face language as a barrier to effective confidence?
5) Do you have personality traits that hold you back in your field?
6) What are your weaknesses?
3) Opportunities
Opportunities come in different shapes and forms. Sometimes opportunities pass by you without you even noticing them. It is very important to identify the opportunity if you want to grope it. you should find an opportunity that matches your strengths and if it doesn’t match your skills then find a way to improve your strengths and catch the opportunity.
Factors to be looked at to identify opportunities.
1) Are there any advancements or changes in your industry that you can take advantage of?
2) Upcoming technology in the emerging trend that you can make use of.
3) New Positions in organizations that match your skills.
4) Can acquiring new skills give you a competitive advantage.
4) Threats
When doing a personal SWOT analysis you need to think of yourself as a company or a product and assess yourself against others. This way it makes it easy for you to identify threats. So here’s how to identify threats.
1) What obstacles do you currently face at work?
2) Are any of your colleagues competing with you for projects or roles?
3) Is your job dynamic i.e changing in nature.
4) Does change Technology is threatening your position?
5) Could any of your weaknesses lead to threats?
It is very important to fix the threats to be successful in a career. If you are facing a problem with that, please seek the help of professionals.
Now, it is important to keep in mind, you have to interlink all four points with each other to get the most appropriate answers to your questions. Sometimes, your strengths do not generate any opportunities for you, weakness might lead to a threat, strengths are not capable of dealing with weaknesses and threats. In such a situation to make the circumstances in your favor, you need to perform SWOT Analysis honestly and appropriately. Still, if you are stuck in your mind space and can’t perform it on your own, seek the advice of professionals.