How to Conduct a Personal SWOT Analysis (Before Facing Job Interviews)

The fact that you are facing job interviews means that you are at a crossroads in your life journey. This is a perfect opportunity to take a fresh look at yourself; to look back at where you have been; where you are now and where you want to go. And that review should include not just your professional life, but also your personal life and your life goals and aspirations.

This article explains with examples how you can do a personal SWOT analysis—looking at your Strengths, Weaknesses as well Opportunities ahead and potential Threats—to be better prepared for your next job interview.

What is a Personal SWOT Assessment?

A personal SWOT is an ideal tool for self-discovery, but it is also a lot more. A personal SWOT assessment is both an assessment of your Strengths and Weaknesses as well as opportunities that lie ahead and Threats that may derail you or hold you back from achieving your life objectives.

There are two sides to a SWOT Assessment:

Things that come from within you: Strengths and Weaknesses
Things and forces that are outside: Opportunities and Threats

The goal of a Personal SWOT

A lot of people, and even businesses and organizations, believe that listing out their own SWOT is all there is to it. That is not so. You need to go into each of the things you set down in the SWOT listing and find ways to optimize your future potential.

To summarize, your goal in engaging in a Personal SWOT exercise is to:

Get a realistic understanding of your strengths and weaknesses
Improve or maintain your strengths
Overcome weaknesses or find strategies to minimize their negative impacts

In terms of external environmental factors—the opportunities or blessings in your life and threats that may hamper your progress—the goals are to:

Fully explore and understand the opportunities and threats you are faced with
Find ways to counter threats that may harm you and find strategies to minimize their negative impact

How to do a Personal SWOT Analysis

This should be pretty easy for you. Just follow these steps when you perform your own personal SWOT analysis:

List down your strengths. This means listing all strengths, including transferable skills that you possess. Add all personal traits that would help you along the way to achieve your career goals.
List down your weaknesses. Make these relevant for your career. If you are bad at singing or faint at seeing blood, you are not relevant to becoming a coder, accountant, or marketing professional. They would be relevant if you plan to become a singer or a healthcare professional.
List down opportunities. These are external factors and trends that may be supportive or can be leveraged to further your career goals and personal aspirations. Some of these opportunities may be leveraged to overcome personal weaknesses or to mitigate the negative effects of threats.
List down threats. These are external factors that may potentially impede your success. Once these four lists are complete, rewrite them in order of priority: Top strengths, biggest weaknesses, and largest threats first. Ignore those with the least impact.
Take each item and see what needs to be done to improve your career prospects and success:
- Relevant strengths need to be improved or maintained.
- Weaknesses are more important because it is the weakest link in a chain that gives in first. Your weaknesses are likely to impede your success despite possessing a lot of relevant strengths. Find ways to overcome your weaknesses and minimize their negative effects.
- Opportunities are blessings you can count on. They may include financial strength, supporting parents and siblings, a strong network of contacts, and the goodwill of teachers and lecturers, project supervisors, and bosses at work. Opportunities may arise from global megatrends, and the spotting of them can be helpful for future planning and making career decisions.
- Threats are dealt with by coming up with plans and measures to overcome these challenges, should they arise.

In a way, dealing effectively with opportunities and threats discovered in a personal SWOT analysis can be likened to playing chess. You set off one or more pieces against another in order to turn things to your advantage and minimize disadvantages.

Most of us find it difficult to see our strengths and weaknesses clearly. Nor are we fully aware of all the blessings in our lives or the potential threats and dangers that lie ahead. Others may be able to help. Consider getting a friend, family member, or mentor to help you complete the Personal SWOT.

Why is a Periodic Personal SWOT Necessary?

As you would imagine, our student may need to do another personal SWOT assessment once he has spent a couple of years in college. This is because, then he needs to prepare for how he can compete best in the job market as a newly minted graduate.

Is that too early to think about it? Not really. Consider these factors:

There is severe competition in the job market, whether in Sri Lanka or globally.
Those with internship experience (while at college) would find it easier to get into jobs.
Volunteering with organizations related to his chosen industry helps build a network of contacts. He can then use those contacts when he wants to find work after college.
Volunteering and internships help develop transferable skills such as teamwork, decision-making, and problem-solving that are valued by employers.
The final years of university may require a lot of time commitment. So doing other work such as volunteering earlier would help.
The longer you engage with volunteering and internships the more you develop a larger network of contacts that you may be able to leverage for finding a job. If you really stand out, you may even get a job offer in the company you interned with.
There may be industry specializations that he may want to explore. Checking these out online in the early university years would help in making career choices down the line.
There may also be certifications and qualifications that may be obtainable online (which are possible to follow in the first years of college) that may help strengthen the job applications once he graduates.

All of these issues may come to light if our school leaver takes the time to do a follow-up personal SWOT after the first year of college.

Similarly, you too should go through a personal SWOT analysis periodically. The time when you are searching for jobs is ideal for this. As you climb up the career ladder, gaining experience, and gathering qualifications and new skills, you too should repeat this exercise, periodically.

How Can a Personal SWOT Help in Your Job Search?

Engaging in a personal SWOT analysis will: