A method career changers can use to quickly audit their skills and experience so they are ready to seize opportunity

Over time we accumulate more experience and learn more skills, yet we easily forget half of it.

After writing a career course and helping many understand their value, here's a systematic way you can quickly audit yourself so that you’re ready to consider your next big career move or opportunity.

Because we are all sitting on a mountain of value.

Step 1: List out all your general soft and hard skills

Start thinking back to any courses you’ve done or skills you've honed over the years. Where do you have strengths? What do you find easy that others find hard? What have you had to do many times?

Examples: writing, presentation skills, online facilitation, difficult conversations, speaking, planning, project management, etc.

Step 2: Consider business functions you've worked within

Most businesses operate with a number of key functions: Marketing, Sales, HR, Operations, IT, Legal, Product Development.

Go through your career and note down all of the functional experience you have got by thinking back to the departments you've worked within. Ideally try to list out sub-areas of a function e.g. e-mail marketing, recruitment, employee engagement.

Make a note if you feel this knowledge was particularly industry-specific e.g. operations for an airline vs. operations for a software company.

Step 3: Scan your industry knowledge

Think about the industries you have knowledge of. Not just the ones you have worked within, but also consider industries where you've learned by osmosis through close relatives, friends or partners.

Step 4: Capture specialist skills, achievements and hobbies

Finally, consider anything specialist or ad hoc that you’ve done in the past. Maybe you spent a day researching AI; you understand the stock markets or can dance!

Finally, walk away from this list and do something else for 24 hours. Then come back and go through it again to see if you can mine anything more.