This month, I’ve done episodes covering your Motivated Skills, your personality preferences using the framework of the MBTI, your Core Values, and your Areas of Expertise in making career decisions.
Remember, I’ve talked about the macro- and micro-level of career decisions. On the macro level, you are making a decision about the career path you will follow. On a micro-level, you are using this information to make decisions about which jobs to take. On an even more micro-level, you are using the knowledge to guide projects, programs, committee assignments, and job duties…or to help you boss make these same decisions.
Today I want to bring all of these things together. First, a refresher.
Motivated Skills: Those skills that you are both very good at and get a great deal of pleasure from doing. The reason they are called Motivated Skills is because the more you do them, the more motivated you will be about your work.
The opposite of Motivated Skills is Burnout Skills. Burnout Skills are those skills that you are very good at, but DON’T get any pleasure from doing. In fact, these skills suck the motivation right out of you. The more you have to perform Burnout Skills in your work, the more likely you are to…you guessed it…burn out.
A few examples of Motivated Skills are Writing, Presentation Skills, Customer Service, Working with Numerical Data, Research, Mechanical Reasoning, Troubleshooting, Teaching, and Planning.

Personality: Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as the framework, it measures personality preferences on four scales and identifies one of 16 personality types based on your responses. The MBTI identifies your innate preferences…the way you prefer to handle a situation or task if given the option.
The preference pairs of the MBTI are:
Extraversion vs. Introversion, which is your orientation to the outer world…where you get your energy from.
Sensing vs. Intuition, which is your preferred way of taking in information, and they type of information you prefer to work with.
Thinking vs. Feeling, which is your preferred decision-making style.
Judging vs. Perceiving, which is how you order your world.

Core Values: What is most important to you in an employer, a work environment, and the specific work you’re doing.
Identifying these “non-negotiable” values helps you align your career choices with what is most important to you. And alignment increases your chance for career success, compensation, and satisfaction.
Here are a few sample Values:
Utilize physical strength and coordination
Utilize courage and take risks
Utilize creativity and originality
Opportunity for advancement
Ability to do a job as efficiently as possible
Receive recognition for accomplishments
Ability to exert power and influence
Higher than average financial rewards

Areas of Expertise: What are You REALLY Good At? We’re talking about capitalizing on your Areas of Expertise.
If you’re just getting out of college, your Areas of Expertise are probably vague ideas…shadows of what is to come. But if you’ve been in the work force for a few years, you should have at least 2-3 Areas of Expertise, with more to develop as you progress through your career.
I connected the Areas of Expertise to your Motivated Skills, because I see your Areas of Expertise as sub-sets of your Motivated Skills.
Let’s say, for example, one of your Motivated Skills is Writing, which is defined as “Possessing excellent writing skills. Able to create business or technical documents, correspondence, and other effective written communications.”
So you get a job in the Public Relations office of a company, where one of your main duties is to write press releases. Because of this experience, one of your Areas of Expertise becomes “Writing Press Releases.”
Let’s put all of this information together in a couple of case studies that will hopefully help you get the idea.

Case #1 – Danielle
Danielle is a 25-year-old college graduate who studied communications in college and has bee