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How to identify your interest and skills ?

•  In this blog, we'll discuss about how to make a list of your interests and skills. 
• Knowing your interests and skills helps you to choose your career that is best for you.

Let's begin with a definition of interests and skills.

Interests are subjects, ideas or things you want to know more about. Interest can also be an activity or hobby that you enjoy doing in your free time. 

For example, if you like to play games,cook or  read books, you could say those are interests or hobbies. What are your interests or hobbies ? 

Write two lists on one page, the left side with subjects or things that you like learning about and the right side a list of things that you enjoy doing. Let's look at this with an example john. 

One of his interest is reading Internet News articles about computer programming. He should write that in the left side of the paper. John also enjoys playing games in the computer games, so he should put that on the right side of the paper. 

When you write all of the things that you are interested in, you may notice that they are related or connected in some way. Many career coaches say that knowing your interests or hobbies often helps you to identify your skills.

So what exactly are skills and how are they different from interests ? 

A skill is the ability to do something well. Some skills are natural,meaning that we are born with these skills. Other skills are learned and we develop these skills over time. Skills can also be divided into more categories.

   1. Functional skills - things you can do,like driving 

   2. Subject skills - things you know, for example, Indian history 

   3. Personal trait skills - ways that you act 

For example, let's look at John's skills. 

We know that John likes to read about computer programming and play online computer games. 

When he plays games online,he is able to watch the screen and type quickly at the same time. John is also very good in all of his maths classes, and he asks many questions. So we can say that he has strong Math skills and he is curious. 

Using this example, we can see that John has 

Functional skills - typing quickly 

Subject skills - Math and 

Personal trait skilss - curiosity 

Now, John knows his interest and skills, he might begin looking for jobs that are related to technology or computer programming. 

Like John once you identify your interests and skills, you are more likely to choose a job or career path that is best for you.