Because I have been out of town all day....

I am going to pass on a long post today (really) until tomorrow, but I wanted to pass on one brief thought to as a framework for helping to think about skills. When we are asked what we do for a living, most of us quickly respond with our job title. I'm an assistant director, so I assist someone in directing. Actually, my job of assistant directing is composed of many tasks. I schedule and assign workshops and seminars, prepare and evaluate content for workshops and trainings, develop marketing campaigns to apprise students of the Career Center's services, develop career-related web content, etc. Let's take just one of these tasks... scheduling and assigning workshops. In order to do this effectively I have to use the following skills.

• Organizational Skills - To plan when and where workshops will be offered.
• Interpersonal Skills - To inform my staff of their assigned duties and expectations.
• Written and Verbal Communication Skills - To create marketing materials for workshops
• Problem-Solving Skills - To work out schedule and room conflicts

I can catalog my skills by listing the most common tasks that make up my job. In it's simplest form it can be seen as "Job = Tasks + Skills." Take few minutes over the several days

to list the most common tasks from your job and determine what skills you use to complete them.

I'm tired. I think I'll turn in.