Skills Morph: What Is It?

A “skills morph” is just my way of describing how we adapt our skills from one field to another. (I just wanted a quirky, creative way of describing it.) How can we adapt our skills to a new job or career? My brother has helped me see how certain skills I’ve developed in the library field can be adapted to fit elsewhere. Sometimes it isn’t that we don’t have the right skills for something new, but it has to do with how we perceive or describe the skills. Adapting a skill is often very specific to an individual job. (Check out Whitney Bonds’ video on YouTube about how to adapt your knowledge into a small business.)

I’ve already talked about doing my skills evaluation in which I looked at both my strong and weak points. Now, I’m looking at more specific skills I have already learned to adapt from job to job and career to career. During this series of posts, I’ll discuss specific skills that I’ve adapted from one situation to another. These will include how I adapted singing at church to improving my public speaking skills, how resigning from jobs gave me amateur technical writing experience, how teaching computer skills classes made me better at sharing my knowledge, and a handful of other adaptations.

During this series, grab a notebook and record your strongest individual skills. Now think about how you developed them. How are you using those skills now? How could you use those skills in a new way or environment? This will be particularly helpful if you already know what career field you’re interested in, but honestly, it can also just help to brainstorm about how to adapt a skill into something new. The great thing about this is you can just think about skills you already have so be positive and creative.

Click below for a free downloadable PDF of a quick one-page worksheet of your skills adaptations. Don’t overthink this. It isn’t a test. It’s just meant to help you see what skills you have, where they originated, how you use them, and how you can adapt them in the future. (If, like me, you are security conscious about downloading files from online, be certain to check it with your antivirus software or try checking it free on VIRUSTOTAL at https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload. You can never be too careful in protecting your devices, and I won’t be insulted because I check my own old files when I download them from old devices. VIRUSTOTAL was recommended by a university where I worked so I have used it especially to check new websites.)

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Inspirational Verse for the Day:

In his grace, God has given us different gifts for doing certain things well. So if God has given you the ability to prophesy, speak out with as much faith as God has given you. (Romans 12:6, NLT)