You will be able to describe your skills as things you can do, with evidence, rather than as job titles.
Wei Ling is 28 and works as an operations executive at a logistics company in Jurong. When a friend asked her what she was good at, she said "operations", then stopped, because she could not say what that meant. Her job title described where she sat on the org chart. It said nothing about what she could actually do.
Most people hit the same wall when they start the skills circle from lesson 1.1, Skills, interests and market: the three-circle test. They write down job titles, departments and company names, and the list looks thin. This lesson shows you how to get underneath the title to the skills, and how to back each one with evidence.
A job title is a label your employer chose for its own reasons, often to fit a pay grade. Two people called "operations executive" can do very different work. One might spend the week chasing delivery slots. Another might schedule drivers, negotiate rates with three trucking vendors and build the weekly report that management uses to decide which routes to cut.
That second person has at least three skills an employer in another field might pay for. She can schedule under tight constraints, she can negotiate with suppliers, and she can analyse data well enough that managers act on it. None of those words appear in the title.
So when you list your skills, write them as verbs with an object. "Negotiate delivery rates with vendors" is a skill. "Operations" is a department. "Build Excel models that compare route costs" is a skill. "Logistics" is an industry. The verb form also makes the skill portable, because you can picture it in a different company.
The fastest way to find your real skills is to notice what other people ask you to help with. Colleagues go to whoever can solve the problem, and they come back if it worked, so their requests are a fairly honest record of what you do well.
When Wei Ling thought about it, the pattern was obvious. Her team lead asked her to fix spreadsheets that had stopped working. A new hire asked her how to read the warehouse dashboard. Her cousin asked her to help plan a wedding budget with forty line items. Her friends asked her to sort out group travel. Each request pointed at the same thing: she could take a messy set of numbers and turn it into something people could act on.
Look outside work as well. What do friends message you about? Who asks you to read their cover letter, mediate an argument, set up their new laptop or explain an insurance policy? Requests are evidence, because nobody asks for help from someone who is bad at the thing.
There is a trap here. Skills that come easily to you feel like nothing special, so you skip them. If people keep asking you for something and you think "but anyone can do that", write it down anyway. Usually not everyone can.
Once you have a raw list, split it into two groups.
Technical skills are tied to a field, a tool or a body of knowledge. Pivot tables, SAP, Python, GST filings and balance sheets all belong here. They are easy to name and easy for an employer to test.
Transferable skills move with you from one field to another. Clear writing, problem analysis, people management, project management and the patience to calm an upset customer all count. They are harder to prove, but they are often the reason a switcher gets hired, because the new employer can teach the tools and cannot easily teach judgement.
Wei Ling's list ended up with technical skills such as Excel modelling and reading warehouse management system reports, and transferable skills such as vendor negotiation, explaining numbers to people who hate numbers, and getting several teams to hit one deadline. You need both groups, and a career switch usually means carrying the transferable skills across and building new technical ones.
Your own words for a skill may not match the words employers search for. You might say "sorting out messy data". A job ad says "data cleaning and validation". If your CV and LinkedIn profile use your words, a recruiter's keyword search may never find you.
SkillsFuture Singapore publishes Skills Frameworks for different sectors, such as logistics, financial services and infocomm technology. Each one lists job roles in that sector and the skills each role uses, with descriptions. You do not need to read a framework end to end. Find the sector you work in now and the one you are curious about, open a role close to yours, and compare its skills list with your own. You will often find the official term for something you already do, and sometimes a skill you had not thought to claim.
Treat the frameworks as a dictionary for the right words. They describe roles in general, and a real employer may weight the skills differently. Module 2 shows you how to check that against live job ads.
A skill without an example is a claim. Next to each skill, write one short example of when you used it and what happened. "Negotiated delivery rates with three vendors and moved two routes to a cheaper one" is evidence. "Good at negotiating" is not.
These examples become raw material later. They turn into CV bullets in module 3, LinkedIn entries in module 4 and interview stories in module 6, so the work you put in now pays off several times.
Your own view of your skills has blind spots, though. The people who work with you see things you take for granted, and they remember the times you helped them more clearly than you do. The activity below asks three of them to tell you, in their words, what they would come to you for.
Ask three people who know your work what they would come to you for, and add their answers to your skills list with one example each.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).