I always find it really hard to quantify the skills and weaknesses that I find within myself, it being such a gray zone of comparison with no quantifiability. Though breaking these assets into “soft” and “hard” skills definitely allow me to think about the subject and put a direct pointer to what they are for me.
I would say my soft skills are: Adaptability, Conflict Management, Resourcefulness. Regarding adaptability, the final outcomes of projects that I work on often look drastically different than my original ideas or proposals. When going into something new, I often go with a very rough outline. This allows me to not be stuck to one idea and branch out to wherever a project leads. The adaptability also accounts for the second soft skill of “Conflict Management”. I mainly refer to creative differences for this soft skill. Since what I tend to work on is such a collaborative process, it’s bound to have people with different opinions on what is best for the project. When it comes to me having a different mindset regarding what’s best, I avoid antagonizing the opposing party and try to compromise since I do try to see their perspective. Resourcefulness also branches off from adaptability, however, where skill one comes in when willing to split down a separate path, resourcefulness comes into play when I have to go down one path and am not given the easiest materials to do so and finding other methods to lie on the same track.
Hard skills were a lot harder to determine since they seem to be a lot more precise and less subjective. However, the 3 that I feel like I portray the strongest are technology comprehension, sufficient knowledge of editing softwares, and presentation skills. Technology wise, I have always felt pretty literate; I enjoy coding a lot which has helped me through a lot of technical difficulties fixing small bugs for projects I work on. Editing wise, I am mainly proficient in Premiere but I have been forced to use Resolve and Final Cut in the past so I am relatively familiar with those as well. I love presenting things; most people I know don’t, however I just love talking to a crowd, so presentation skills, specifically comfortability, is definitely a strong suit of mine.
Two soft skills I would like to work on are commitment and time management. Commitment to specific ideas is a big issue of mine, I often get excited about a project I want to pursue and then eventually lose passion part way through it. I want to learn how to commit fully to projects to finish them out to the max. Time management is another big issue for me. Though I do complete almost all my work by the deadline, I often find myself crunching last minute to complete it. (Such as this blog post assignment)
A hard skill I would definitely like to improve on, and this maybe a bit to specific, is mastering excel spreadsheets. My mom is an accountant and keeps everything in excel and it seems like such a useful resource to be proficient in that it is definitely up high in my mind of things to learn. Networking is the hard skill I feel I need to improve on, though I don’t think I am uncomfortable meeting new people and engaging in conversation, I feel as though I have difficulty presenting myself in a way that would be beneficial to my career, such as acting more professionally and engaging in topics that can lead to discussion of opportunities.