Abilities – Don’t Waste Your Talent!
Have you ever wondered what you’re naturally good at? Sure, your fourth grade teacher, said you were quick with numbers and that your poem showed you had a way with words. Uncle Bill marveled at how quickly you figured out “who killed the maid in the dining room with the knife?” In high school, you were yearbook editor, and had the lead in “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” On weekends you spent hours taking apart and putting back together your motorcycle.
Does this mean you have natural ability in math, writing, detecting, singing, acting or auto mechanics? And how would really knowing your natural abilities benefit you at work?
We think of abilities as a natural capacity to perform certain significant work-related tasks faster and more easily than the next person. While abilities may be inherited or a reflection of our environment, or both, we know abilities don’t change much over time no matter your education or experience. Your high abilities at age 15 will be your high abilities at 25, 35 and beyond.
Researchers have identified many different abilities that can be measured using worksamples (scientifically constructed tasks that measure one ability at a time). Abilities involve things like how your brain takes in information, how you think and problem solve, whether you can think and visualize in three dimensions, and how many ideas you have flowing through your mind at a given time.
By isolating individual abilities, worksamples often reveal talents and abilities we didn’t know we had, and these findings may or may not correspond to our training, experience, interests or knowledge. Sometimes we have found our abilities through experience (musical talent is an example) or they remain undiscovered or we don’t realize how central they are to career satisfaction.
Discovering what your abilities are is the foundational step in designing a career that feels like it is truly yours. Research has shown that people experience dissatisfaction when they are not using their abilities or when a job demands an ability they simply don’t have. So, uncovering your total pattern of abilities is important in understanding which types of pursuits would be most satisfying to you.
The ability testing and feedback we use evolved from work first developed by industry in the 1930’s and has been further refined and validated by researchers in the areas of aptitude and career testing over more recent decades. Over the years, well over 700,000 people have taken a version of this battery.
Today, The Highlands Company, has made it easily accessible on line. The Highlands approach puts abilities in context and helps you understand your own abilities and ability profile so that you can use it to inform your life choices now and later on.
Take a look at the Highlands Company, and/or the Highlands Student Center websites, then come back and talk to us. We are licensed to provide the Battery, explain the results and help you make maximum use of the critical information about you that this process will uncover. People say our way of doing the feedback makes the Battery information come alive.
