Over the last week, I’ve given a lot of thought into which client I should highlight as an example of discovering talents.  There have been many, all unique, with so many talents to share.  I anticipate using this person as an example throughout the process of describing how you discover yourself and match it to the market, so it has been difficult to pick the “best” one.

With much thought, I’ve decided to make this example personal.  No, I’m not going to describe myself and my journey, but I’m not going to use a paying client either.  Instead, I’m going to use someone who is more like me in genetics than anyone else on this planet, and someone who I helped before I even realized that career development was even what I wanted to do. Helping Graham, my brother, helped me discern that I wanted to be the go-to person for career help.

Why personal?  Because career exploration and decisions are very personal.  By describing someone who I have seen grow and mature through this process, I feel as though I can more adequately describe its impact.

So, with all that said, Graham will be my “guinea pig” as I walk you all through a real example the career process.

Graham did the KSAO process for talent identification indicating his top 2-3 strengths in each area:

Knowledge:

Sales and Marketing — Knowledge of principles and methods for showing, promoting, and selling products or services. This includes marketing strategy and tactics, product demonstration, sales techniques, and sales control systems.

I would also add for him: Administration and Management — Knowledge of business and management principles involved in strategic planning, resource allocation, human resources modeling, leadership technique, production methods, and coordination of people and resources.

Skills:

Critical Thinking — Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problem solving.

Judgment and Decision Making — Considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one.

Ability:

Inductive Reasoning — The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).

Memorization — The ability to remember information such as words, numbers, pictures, and procedures.

Remember, you can click on the title of each of these to see career matches.  What do you think Graham does for a living today? There isn’t a lot of consistency in his career matches based just on this.  Stay tuned for next week as we discuss passions and then describe Graham’s passions in relation to our process.  If you can’t figure out what he does yet, the pieces will come together over the next few weeks.