When a business wants to understand where they are in the market compared to their competitors they would perform a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. When an individual wants to figure out where they are in the job market compared to their competitors they would perform a personal SWOT analysis on their chosen career.
A Personal SWOT analysis evaluates our Strengths, our Weaknesses, our career Opportunities, our career Threats. Seeing it all on paper helps when you’re trying to make some hard decisions about what to do next.
The SWOT analysis helps us discover the following:
- Strengths that help us outshine our competition
- Perceived Weaknesses that help our competition look better than us
- Opportunities that we can take advantage of if we address our weaknesses
- Threats that exist in the Job Market to our chosen career
By doing a Personal SWOT analysis we will end up with a list of our perceived weaknesses.
If you want to improve your market position, you need to convert your list of weaknesses into a personal action item list.
Your mission is to improve your market position daily by focusing on minimizing your weaknesses. Sometimes, these perceived weaknesses can be addressed through changes in appearance or through public relations activities. Other perceived weaknesses might be lack of experience, lack of skills or lack of formal education. These weaknesses can also be addressed. They might take a little more time, but they’re not impossible to overcome.
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step” – Lao Tzu
Just remember in order to improve your market position, you need to start somewhere. By addressing our perceived weaknesses we will no longer be perceived as inferior to our competition. Instead, our Strengths will begin to shine and help us stand out against the competition in our job market.
