A Skills-Based Approach to Developing a Career

Skills-Based Approach is a methodology centered on the development of a skill set over a career; it is a progression in four stages: planning, building, presenting, and validating. Each stage has proposed ways to achieve its objectives. The beauty of a skills-based approach is its simplicity and flexibility. It effectively handles the complex factors in career planning and development, such as changing career demands due to technology and demographics, rising education costs, and increasingly competitive employment market. A skill set represents your functional capabilities, essentially a list of skills with your level of expertise. Skill sets are searchable, standardized, interactive, and portable. Professional web services have adopted the use of skill sets and some have built sophisticated search engines based on them. This book guides you through planning a skill set to achieve career aspirations, learning and building an expertise with skills and how to respond to setbacks or opportunities, presenting skills on various platforms, and validating skills so you establish credibility with your intended audience. The objective of this book is to provide a framework that can be used throughout your career to increase your chances of success. Career planning is the key to finding happiness.