How to Do a Psychology Student Skills Audit

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

Majoring in psychology provides students with a variety of skills. These skills include:

• Goal-setting skills, including self-regulation.
• Research skills, including searching for and evaluating information.
• Communication skills, including writing or presenting information to different audiences.
• Decision-making skills, including being aware of human biases.
• Empathy and perspective-taking skills, including being able to see and appreciate other people’s perspectives.
• Organizational skills, including being able to plan ahead.

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

One of the challenges that some students face, however, is that they don’t realize all the skills they have actually acquired by taking psychology courses or those related to the major (e.g., statistics, data analysis). You may not always recall the skills you have acquired or when you learned them, and it can be hard to do so in the moment (as when someone asks you what you learned during your university education—you learned or will learn a lot—but it can be difficult to come up with a pithy summary.

If you are a psychology major now (or you were when you were a student), it’s not too late to do a “skills audit” of what you learned in the course of your studies. By skills audit, I mean taking some time to generate a list of the skills you acquired in a course (or courses) and then jot down specific examples of how you applied the skills you learned. For example, psychology majors learn a lot about research design and how to rule out alternative explanations for findings. They do so by reading about psychological experiments and identifying flaws that might make the results questionable or even invalid. That is a skill that can be used in graduate school or even in the workplace when introducing changes aimed at improving 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 education. Keep the list and look at it periodically—you may add to it as you learn newer skills or refine those you already have. This list can be useful when preparing for a job interview or applying to graduate school (e.g., you can tout what skills you possess in your personal statement). If you are still a college student, you can share your skills when applying for an internship or a part-time job. Having done a skills audit will make sharing your best features with others much easier.

For other ideas about skills, take a look at the American Psychological Association's Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major. You may be surprised at the skills you have that you have overlooked.