Hard Skills:
– UX / UI design
– Adobe Creative Suite
– Letterpress printing
Soft Skills:
– Highly adaptable
– Emotional intelligence
– Collaborative
For all of my hard skills, these are areas I have had job experience or education in and have been working hard towards. Soft skills I have learned through life lessons along the way. I have become a highly adaptable person through uprooting my life a handful of times in my adult life with 3 across country moves. Each time to a new destination where I have had to learn how to grow myself into new communities, find employment and navigate life’s ups and downs while very far from my normal support groups from any family or friends. I’ve learned how to collaborate well through my experience with joining bands and writing music with bandmates, and my emotional intelligence has been a lifelong learning experience I feel like with every social exchange I become more understanding and empathetic towards others.
Becoming more skilled with the entire Adobe Creative Suite would be on my list for continued hard skills, along with project management because that is an area I tend to have a difficult time with. Soft skills I could use work on are how to effectively communicate across the board with individuals (especially difficult individuals that may treat me or others with lack of respect) and how to self advocate a bit more. As I reflect on the self advocacy, I realize through my upbringing, being a woman, and also experiences in relationships I have normally given way to others’ wants and needs before my own. Often this has led me to feeling like I get the short end of the stick in matters that I should be stepping up for myself on. I have made steps to advocating for myself a bit better in the workplace. For instance, I was working for an employer a year ago who was not giving me sick pay and argued against me when I explained that it was a labor law here. He tried to say that this was new as of the pandemic (claiming sick pay did not become written into law until 2020, but he was lying and I found it had passed in 2018). I was new to Washington and not fully familiar with the labor laws here, but I was out of work for an extended period of time due to surgery. It put a lot of financial strain on me, so I confronted my employer with the Washington state labor laws with sick pay so I could be compensated for a portion of missed work hours. I gathered a log of all of my totaled work hours from the beginning of my employment and totaled the number of hours I was owed in sick pay. I kept all my emotions in control, presented all my gathered information and totaled hours, and finally got him to agree I was owed back pay for the sick hours I had acquired. I continued to work for this company for another month or two, but things like this kept happening so I advocated for myself again and found a job elsewhere. Since then, my new place of employment has been a very positive change with a boss who is very respectful and uplifting and I am happy to have made those choices for myself since it has improved my work life.