Your Child - Career Skills

Apart from the self assessment, theoretical and practical examination and exposure to selected careers, you should also help your child with the identification of career skills:

• Identify skills required for all careers
• Identify skills required for the selected careers.
• Identify skills he/she already has
• List the skills he/she has
• Build a resume
• Identify weaknesses that need work
• Identify strengths that can be build upon and highlighted in a resume
• Learn how to write a cover letter

The above tasks should be performed as part of the career planning process.

You can help your child to identify and list the career skills by using the list of skills below as guideline:

Competency or ability related career skills

Interaction skills

• Teamwork ability
• Instructing others or Training others
• negotiating
• motivating
• leading

Resources

• Allocation of time, finances, material and people to complete projects.

Research skills

• Finding information
• Organization of information
• Retrieval and repackaging of information
• Interpretation and usage of the information
• Using technology such as computers
• Communicating the results.

System working

• Understanding procedures in the system.
• Following the procedures
• Correcting mistakes.

Equipment

• Ability to use required technology to perform tasks.

The following are basic skills required for most of the jobs.

Communication

• Read
• Write
• Listen
• Present
• Conflict resolution

Mathematical

Some jobs also require a minimum level of skills in these:

• Calculation
• Accounting
• Measuring

Thinking

• Creative and innovative
• Analytical and critical
• Logical
• Holistic
• Detail

Personality traits

• Reliability
• Confidence
• Trust worthiness
• Work ethics

Help your child develop skills in the above areas that are applicable to most jobs. Identify weaknesses in the list and work on those areas as well. Let your child update the list once a year.

In addition, help your child also to build a resume. You can use the templates, resources and tips at CVtips.com to this end. Apart from this, become involved and have open discussions with your child. The child can attend a workshop on resume building or networking. Expose your child to as many career fairs as you can and help the child to develop a strong network base.

It is important that the child also considesr the cost of obtaining training and that you start to identify ways to fund it. Plan ahead and support the child. Also remember that the college majors don't limit your child to one career. He or she may very well decide to do something totally different after the internship and that should also be respected. The training will only form a base unto the career world, and should thus not be restrictive. The most important part of the process is to aid the child in developing required career skills from a young age.