Month 2 - Identifying Career motivations

You are now in month two of your mentoring partnership. Talking to your mentor about your skills and getting their advice on how you can develop yourself can be useful to support you with your next steps.

Identifying your skills and areas to develop

It can be easy to forget about the skills you already have, so talking through your current experiences with your mentor can help to identify these skills. The below may be a useful starting point:

• Reflect on skills gained whilst at university such as time management, group work, budgeting, social skills.
• Consider any volunteering or work experience you have, it doesn’t matter how brief or extensive. Skills could include customer service or communication.

This can reveal areas for development too, which you may need to think about filling for certain roles or sectors. Thrive is a safe space to explore this, there is no expectation from our mentors that you have all of the skills you need already.

An interesting topic of discussion with your mentor can be fine tuning which skills you enjoy tapping into. For example, you may be very good at group work, but you may not necessarily enjoy it. This activity can help you to identify what motivates you.

Finding what motivates you

Thinking about what motivates and drives you, can help you to navigate towards certain roles and sectors.

Are there certain things you would class as non-negotiable in a job? For example, doing a job that helps others or perhaps an opportunity that allows you to use your entrepreneurial skills?

Career theorist Edgar Schein identified eight career anchors, which are things that pull people to specific types of jobs. You can read more about career anchors and take a quiz, and perhaps explore the outcome with your mentor. Has this activity confirmed your drivers, or did this bring about different drivers that you did not expect?

Our Knowing Yourself page focuses on building self-awareness to support with your career, there are further tools here that may help you to continue exploring this.

Remember you can access all 10 talking points to feel free to look through them all, find topics that interest you most or mix up the order however suits you and your mentor.