“Creating awareness on validation of the acquired competences”

Why is it important to recognise and validate your capabilities and competencies?

One of the reasons why some people find it hard to succeed in life is because they have not identified their capabilities and competences and they do not know where to go in life. Everyone possesses a wide range of skills, capabilities and competences and it is essential to identify them. Some of them are innate and may come easy to a person but not everything is about what someone has been born with. There are many competences that can be worked, enhanced, and developed. Just by making an exercise of self-reflection and identifying your competences you will be able to improve them and the same happens with someone’s gaps and needs of improvement of some skills.

It is important to identify what needs to be improved to work that aspect harder and be able to succeed. The reason why it is important to recognize our abilities and qualities is because doing this is related to a healthy self-esteem, understanding our own strengths and virtues, in order to use them to work on your weaknesses and defects, accepting them. Self-esteem is the perception we have about ourselves, this is of vital importance for our personal development and for the way we relate to other individuals in our society, the quality of our self-esteem also defines the quality of our personal relationships and it is related to the access to the labour market.

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Here are some tips:

1. First of all, think about what you like. What are your hobbies? What do you do in your daily life that you enjoy? Reflecting about that may give you hints to identify what you are good at because normally we tend to like what we are good at.
2. Now, think about the opposite. What are those tasks you hate to accomplish? Maybe finances are one of those tasks you dislike, and you tend to ignore them or avoid them. Well, you must know that this attitude is the opposite you should adopt. The best thing is to keep trying to improve and losing your fear for failure.

After this self-reflection exercise, you could make a list of your life experiences. Maybe you have gained experience through different jobs, training courses of life experiences. Reflect and write down in a list, the competences you think you have learned thank you to these experiences.

Consider your personality. Your personality can affect the way you see yourself and the way you acknowledge your competences. You should also work emotional intelligence and confidence. This will increase your motivation and will give you strength to improve whatever it is you lack and identify what you are good at. Whenever you are making use of a potential competence you did not recognise before, make yourself these questions:

• Do I feel comfortable doing this?
• Am I feeling confident and capable?
• Do I need any help to solve this problem?
• Do I follow my intuition to develop this task?
• Do I feel like I can give my opinion with security related to this issue?
• Am I leading this specific situation?
• Am I doing this specific task “my way”?

Remember that you can always improve. Talent is not an innate quality, but the sum of work and personal effort. It is comprised of three different characteristics: capacity, commitment, and conduct.

• Capacity: refers to the set of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and competences that are developed by an individual.
• Commitment: it is the degree of involvement that an individual has towards a job, activity or learning, measured through the effort invested in the development of that activity.
• Conduct: these are the actions carried out, mediated by the internal commitment of the individual towards the activity which is being developed and the capacities of the individual himself.

These are all characteristics that can be improved with hard work.

Ways of acquiring financial competencies informally:

Financial literacy is very important. Finances are everywhere and are an important part of your daily life. Although it is true that currently the education policies are making efforts to focus on providing formal education related to finances, some of the aspects that are useful for one’s daily life are not included in educational curriculums. Nowadays there are endless ways of acquiring informal learning, especially using the internet.

• The importance of reading: The best way to start developing competences in any sector is investigating and choosing books or articles related to the topic. You can start with easy readings and then continue with more difficult documents.
• The next step could be a course such as this one (FIL-Finances in Everyday Life). Online courses available are very useful to improve your skills and knowledge. In these types of training, motivation is very important to continue improving, as following these courses depends on you and your willingness to learn.
• Find experts and ask them directly! If you have received training and you are really interested in the topic, you can find an expert dedicated to financial services. You can assist to seminars or one-to-one conversations that can be very enriching.

Remember, the more you know about a topic, the more you love it. Sometimes we tend to dislike different fields because we have not taken the time to understand them. The first step is breaking down the barriers that we are building without noticing.