Know your What: Skills

21st century skills, also called soft skills, are based on experience and relate to how you interact with others and personal qualities that you bring to a team. In this section, you will (1) explore your top skills and (2) create a skills statement and add it to your website.

21st Century Skills Overview

Your top five skills are located on the top left of your Indigo Report Summary Page. The skills on the report are soft skills, which are also called 21st century skills. These are skills that employers are looking for in the people they hire. There isn’t really a test score you can show to prove you have these skills, but you can provide details of your experience using them.

The good news about skills – they can be learned! The more experience you have and the more you practice a skill, the better you will get at it and the easier it is for you to do.

When you look at your full report, you will see a list of all 23 Indigo skills. The skills at the top are your strongest skills; they’re what you are good at and they should be pretty easy for you to do. The skills at the bottom are the skills that you are less proficient in. You are capable of doing these skills, they just take much more time, effort, and energy from you to do them

Chances are, there is a passion contained in your top skills. Often these skills are also connected to your Motivators and/or DISC. Once you tap into that passion, you can seek out situations that allow you to apply your skills in a fulfilling way.

21st Century Skills Review

To review your top skills, watch the videos associated with at least three of your top 5 skills.

Analytical Problem Solving: Analyzing, diagnosing, and resolving problems.

  • Utilizes logic and systematic processes to analyze and solve problems.
  • Defines the causes, effects, impact, and scope of problems.
  • Evaluates the potential impact of possible solutions and selects the best one.

Conflict Management: Addressing and resolving conflicts for positive outcomes.

  • Readily identifies and addresses issues, concerns, or conflicts.
  • Listens to understand an issue from different perspectives.
  • Tries to settle differences fairly.

Continuous Learning: Taking initiative in learning new concepts and methods.

  • Demonstrates curiosity and enthusiasm for learning.
  • Actively interested in new technologies, processes, and methods.
  • Spends considerable effort on learning.
  • Identifies uses for knowledge.

Creativity/Innovation: Ability to formulate new approaches, ideas, concepts, and methods.

  • Expresses non-traditional perspectives and/or novel approaches.
  • Encourages and promotes innovation.
  • Develops and tests new ideas to explain or solve issues.
  • Imagines new or revolutionary concepts.

Decision Making: Utilizing effective processes to make decisions.

  • Can make tough decisions in a timely manner.
  • Creates a rationale for making decisions.
  • Willing to correct wrong decisions when necessary.
  • Defends rationale for decisions when necessary.

Diplomacy & Tact: Effectively handling difficult or sensitive situations concerning others.

  • Maintains good relationships with others through fair treatment and respect.
  • Respects diversity in race, national origin, religion, gender, lifestyle, age, and disability.

Empathy: Identifying with and caring about others.

  • Demonstrates genuine concern for others.
  • Is sensitive to the emotions people experience.
  • Tries to understand the real needs, concerns, and feelings of others.
  • Advocates for the interests, needs, and wants of others.

Flexibility: Ability to adapt to changes.

  • Responds promptly to shifts in direction, priorities, and schedules.
  • Effective at juggling multiple priorities and tasks.
  • Adapts personal style to work with different people.
  • Maintains productivity during transitions, even in the midst of chaos.

Futuristic Thinking: Imagining, envisioning or predicting what has not yet been realized.

  • Demonstrates an ability to connect the dots and see the big-picture.
  • Recognizes, supports, or even champions progressive ideas.
  • Envisions possibilities others may not.

Goal Orientation: Focusing efforts on meeting a goal, mission or objective.

  • Establishes goals that are relevant, realistic, and attainable.
  • Identifies and implements required plans and milestones to achieve specific business goals.
  • Stays on target to complete goals regardless of obstacles or adverse circumstances.

Interpersonal Skills: Effectively communicating, building rapport, and relating well to all kinds of people.

  • Demonstrates sincere interest in others.
  • Treats all people with respect, courtesy, and consideration.
  • Develops and maintains relationships with many different kinds of people regardless of cultural differences.

Leadership: Achieving extraordinary results through people.

  • Inspires others with compelling visions.
  • Takes risks for the sake of principles, values, or mission.
  • Demonstrates optimism and positive expectations of others.
  • Delegates appropriate responsibilities and authority, & demonstrates loyalty to constituents.

Management: Achieving excellent results through effective use of resources, processes, and people.

  • Comfortable making decisions that affect other people.
  • Delegates tasks and roles appropriately.

Mentoring/Coaching: Guiding and supporting the growth of others.

  • Identifies developmental needs. Encourages initiative and improvement.
  • Provides opportunities for training.
  • Trains, coaches, and mentors others to develop.

Negotiation: Ability to bargain effectively and facilitate agreements.

  • Listens to identify and understand what each party wants.
  • Determines what each party is willing to accept in an agreement.
  • Develops the terms for an agreement.
  • Ensures each party understands the terms of agreement.

People Advocacy: Understanding, defending, and supporting other people’s needs and expectations.

  • Places a high value on customers and their issues.
  • Anticipates customer needs and develops solutions.
  • Meets commitments made to customers.

Personal Responsibility: Taking initiative and responsibility for personal actions.

  • Accepts personal responsibility for the consequences of personal actions.
  • Applies lessons learned from past failures toward achieving future successes.

Persuasion: Ability to convince others to change the way they think, believe, or act.

  • Builds trust and credibility before attempting to promote something.
  • Uses logic and reason to develop arguments that challenge current assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.
  • Identifies and addresses the barriers that prevent people from agreeing.

Planning/Organizing: Using orderly procedures to meet objectives.

  • Works effectively within established time frames and priorities.
  • Prioritizes tasks for highest productivity.
  • Makes adjustments to plan as needed.

Presenting: Communicating effectively to groups.

  • Presents information in ways that makes complex concepts clear.
  • Projects authenticity, confidence, conviction, and passion.
  • Engages the heart and mind of the audience.
  • Communicates in ways that enlighten, educate, challenge, and persuade the audience to think, believe, or behave in a specific way.

Teamwork: Working effectively and productively with others.

  • Meets agreed-upon deadlines for team assignments and commitments.
  • Supports team decisions.
  • Behaves in a manner consistent with team values and mission.
  • Provides constructive feedback to team and its members.

Time and Priority Management: Ability to manage time and priorities, maintaining self-control.

  • Prioritizes activities as necessary to meet goals.
  • Keeps working toward goals without direct supervision (self-directed learner).

Written Communication: Writing clearly and getting thoughts across effectively.

  • Writes in ways that make abstract concepts clear.
  • Succinctly presents viewpoints and arguments.
  • Achieves communication objectives by organizing information in logical sequences that lead readers to come to natural conclusions.
  • Adjusts writing style to specific audiences as needed.

Skills Activity

You are going to create a statement describing how you use some or all 5 of your top skills and put this statement and your top skills on your website.

Let’s start with an example statement from someone whose top skills are Customer Focus, Teamwork, and Appreciating Others:

“I love creating new lessons by listening to the needs of others, or paying attention to the questions I am most often asked and sharing those new learning opportunities with everyone I teach.”

Once you have come up with this statement, put it and your top 5 skills on your website. You can write out your top 5 skills, you can cut and paste them from your report, you can take a screenshot… it is up to you.

Instructions

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