What Is S.W.O.T. Analysis, and How Can It Help Your Career?

Okay, you might be pondering that wait, isn’t SWOT analysis is for businesses who want to improve their business strategy after effective analysis of information and data?

Yes, you are right but this same technique of SWOT analysis can be greatly beneficial for you in your career development as an individual professional as well. Let’s see how!

What is SWOT analysis?

SWOT is an abbreviation that stands for Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. So, you can easily guess that what SWOT analysis might mean. It means a methodical analysis of all of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as a business or as an individual professional. It is not at all difficult to do and you can do it all by yourself within an hour or two. But the benefits of it are many.

Why SWOT Analysis?

In short, we need SWOT analysis to get a penetrative insight into your business and practice. Once you have a clear idea of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, you basically know all there is to know about your career. You know what you have to do and how you should do it to get to your desired position with your career or business. You will be able to utilize your strengths in the best possible manner through your opportunities and minimize risks through avoiding threats and working on weaknesses. So, basically, that’s why you need SWOT analysis for your career development.

Now, as I have said earlier that it is not difficult to do a SWOT analysis, let’s get down to the real action.

It Is You Who Knows Better:

You might think that you need expert assistance to do a SWOT analysis on your career, but you are wrong. It is you who knows yourself more than any other expert does. You must know what are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. No one else will be able to know it better than you. So, it is yourself who needs to do a SWOT analysis for your career.

Grab a Pen and Paper Or a word document would do:

Start listing all of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats into separate categories. The first two categories are your internal factors. Give some serious focus on your whole life – meditate and contemplate on all the aspects of your personality. What are the things you are comfortable doing? What are the things are you afraid of? And so on.

Then move on to discovering your opportunities and threats. These two factors depend upon your external environment and the specific situation you find yourself in life. Try to visualize the whole spectrum of your industry. Look for the sectors that are most suitable in accordance with your strengths and weaknesses. And also locate any other opportunities that you think would be worth considering or you might have a scope to utilize.

Now, think about the obstacles or risks that you might face while going ahead with your targeted opportunities. What troubles might your weaknesses cause? What might other external factors bar you from realizing your goals and utilizing your opportunities?

Finally, now that you have all of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats listed at hand, you will know all by yourself what you will have to do next. The path will be alighted bare in front of you.