Skill Approach is different from the Trait approach mainly because one is trained, and another is born. This means, there is a chance for me to learn about those traits and to prepare for the coming work life. I will use Mumford’s skill approach models as my reference to do self-analysis.
I will avoid the individual attributes, since other than professional objective analysis, is hard to do a self-evaluation. There are three main skills that need to be learned: problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge.
Problem-solving skills mainly discuss people’s abilities to solve problems that have never occur in their life. It is very important to have the creativity and the ability to connect or discover potential alternative choices. In terms of self-analysis, I would need to improve my ability to discover potential alternatives. This is because in my personal opinion creativity is not the ability that I will need in this stage. For people like me who are about to graduate and go into the workforce. Under the condition that I lack working experience, it is very needed to connect the situation that I will face in the work to the problem that I have solved in academic life. I need to be able to solve problems like writing an essay in college, predict and think of an outline of what I should do in this task, and making the adjustment when there is a new idea that appeared in my head. (Northouse, 2019)
Social judgment skills mainly discuss personal’s empathy, social perceptiveness, behavioral flexibility, and persuasive ability. In that aspect, the things I need to be working on is social perceptiveness and behavior flexibility. Social perceptiveness is the ability of one can read potential social cues, which is very hard for students who just enter the workforce. In this aspect, it would be necessary to do some research about the potential social cues that have been posted online and to discuss with friends who have just finish working for one year. Then it would be behavior flexibility, this is about people’s ability to adjust their solution in a changing situation. Under academic life, what we have learned and trained has taught us mainly about how to perform in a fixed pattern like how to prepare for the exam, presentation evaluation table, and how the syllabus will be changed with. However, this is not the case in real life, there are no exam study guide, syllabus for the job, and clear instruction of how the presentation will be evaluated with. It is all blur and untold, thus it is important for me to learn, ask and watch how our coworkers will act and find out the possible standards that will make us to getting an A on the work we have done. (Northouse, 2019)
Knowledge is something that everyone has to spend their life learning, and the thing I need to remember is to not stop learning even after college. I hope with those self-evaluation and analysis, I will be prepared and be ready in the first few years of work life. Hopefully one day, I will be able to do my jobs like drinking water, ease, and comfort.
References:
Northouse, P.G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
Hamel, R. (n.d.). Lesson 4: Skills Approach, 2021.