How to Do a Psychology Student Skills Audit

What are your best qualities? What are some of the important skills you know?

The study of psychology provides students with a wide range of skills. These skills include:

• Goal setting skills, including self-regulation.
• Research skills, including finding and evaluating information.
• Communication skills, including writing or presenting information to different audiences.
• Decision-making skills, including knowledge of human bias.
• Empathy and perspective-taking skills, including the ability to see and appreciate other people’s perspectives.
• Organizational skills, including the ability to plan ahead.

What are some other skills? What skills might be unique to you?

However, one of the challenges that some students face is that they do not realize all the skills that they have actually acquired through taking psychological or degree-related courses (e.g. statistics, data analysis). You may not always remember the skills you acquired or when you learned them, and it may be difficult to do so at the moment (e.g. if someone asks you what you learned during your university education – You’ve learned a lot or will learn a lot – but coming up with a concise summary can be difficult.

If you are now majoring in psychology (or were majoring in it during your studies), it is not too late to do a “competence audit” of what you have learned during your studies. By skills audit, I mean taking some time to make a list of the skills you’ve learned in a course (or courses) and then jotting down specific examples of how you’ve applied the skills you’ve learned. For example, psychology students learn a lot about research design and how to rule out alternative explanations for results. They do this by reading about psychological experiments and identifying flaws that could render the results questionable or even invalid. This is a skill that can be used in grad school or even in the workplace when introducing changes to improve workflow, for example.

So think about the skills you learned, and then write down some examples of how and when you used them during your training. Keep the list and refer to it regularly—you can add to it as you learn newer skills, or hone the ones you already have. This list can be useful when preparing for an interview or when applying for graduate school (e.g. you can state what skills you have in your personal statement). If you are still a student, you can use your skills when applying for an internship or part-time job. Once you’ve completed a skills audit, it becomes much easier to share your best qualities with others.

For more skill ideas, check out the American Psychological Association Guidelines for the bachelor’s degree in psychology. You may be surprised at the skills you have that you may have overlooked.