Do you have trouble selling yourself on your CV? Maybe you know your strengths but have trouble presenting them clearly and concisely with hard evidence to back them up. I’m going to explain a simple method to identify your key competences across many different situations. This approach to analyzing your strengths is called the OAAR Analysis ¹
The process is broken down into four steps:
Objective - this states the tasks you had to deliver and is the basis of the following steps.
What objectives were on your job specification / assignment brief ? What was the expected result?
Analysis - examines your thoughts and evaluation of the different options you had to deliver the task.
What did you know? What didn't you know? What would you have liked to have known?
Action - concerns the implementation of your chosen options.
What did you implement? How did you implement? When did you implement?
Result - outlines the outcomes of your actions.
What was achieved? Who benefited? How much did they benefit?
You should deconstruct your entire education and career using the OAAR Model until you have 10's if not 100's of OAAR's. You can then identify your personal skills and traits by looking for trends and by grouping together tasks or projects that were successful to reveal your key competences.
Identify your 4 strongest competences and build your CV around them.
This approach to identifying your strengths can be done in all areas of your life - work related, academic achievements, even your hobbies and interests. It provides a step by step guide of how you achieve things, not just what you have achieved and therefore conveys your transferable assets to the employer.
Hayden Hill
¹ FAUST, B., and FAUST, M., 2004. Pitch Yourself. 2nd ed, Glasgow: Pearson Education Limited
