
Match of the Month – September 2023
Part of our services is a guarantee towards our clients: if the candidate chooses to stop within six months, we find a replacement free of charge.
As recruiters, we are regularly approached by candidates who need help with their career planning. Some people know from an early age exactly what they want to become when they are older, while others need more time exploring their interests, skills, personality and values to decide which path to take. This process can be complicated, where do you start? Thankfully there are great tools available to help you make a strategic plan to reach your career goals. One of them is the SWOT analysis, a marketing tool than can also be projected on the labour market. In this article, I will discuss how you can use this tool to “find your bliss”.
A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool that can also be applied to career planning. After you have identified your career goals, this tool can help you organise, visualise and evaluate the many internal and external variables that influence making decisions about next steps in your career. It helps you examine your Strengths and Weaknesses (internal environment) and Opportunities and Threats (external environment).
To perform a personal SWOT analysis, answer the following questions:
Your strengths are internal positive aspects that you control and make you special compared to other people in your field of expertise.
Weaknesses are internal negative aspects that you control and can improve (or avoid needing the skill in a next career step). Examining your weaknesses can be an uncomfortable task, to successfully make a SWOT analysis it’s vital that you see yourself as objective as possible. Other people tend to notice things about you that you might be blind to, therefor it can help you to ask people in your work field what areas you need to improve. Ask yourself:
Opportunities are positive external conditions that you do not control but of which you can take advantage of. Ask yourself:
Threats are negative external conditions that you do not control but the effect of which you may be able to lessen. Ask yourself:
When you have answered and written down the answers to these questions, the analysis gives you a realistic view of your situation and helps you evaluate and decide what path you want to take. You now know what strengths you can capitalise on and what weaknesses you will need to improve or avoid. You can then use this knowledge to take advantage of opportunities in line with these strengths and weaknesses and avoid or lessen threats.
I hope this will give you some guidance in your career planning. Of course, the process doesn’t stop after making a SWOT analysis. You now know which direction you want to take, but what steps are needed to get from where you are now to where you want to be? A gap analysis can help develop a practical plan (more about this in a following article). You should also make a plan for how to market yourself.
Part of our services is a guarantee towards our clients: if the candidate chooses to stop within six months, we find a replacement free of charge.
Pieter will share his insights during the "AI in Treasury" session, discussing real-world use cases and the future of treasury recruitment
Recently Pieter de Kiewit was invited by Corporate Treasury 101 to speak about how the role of the treasurer is changing.