Uncover Your Skills

In the first lesson, we covered how to solve a business problem (Lesson 1).
In the second lesson we discussed positioning and perception (Lesson 2).

For this lesson, we will cover how to evaluate the value of your skills.

Confidence plays a big part of growing your business through freelancing as a creative entrepreneur. The large part of your confidence will come from your ability to apply your skills to a project. To grow your confidence, you’ll either have to continue improving your craft or take a step by and quantify what everything you’ve learned up until now.

You know more than you think
You have more skills than you realize. You’ll find that your previous work experiences have given you a wealth of knowledge if you analyze everything.

Grab a sheet of paper and write down all of your past experiences, middle school, high school, college(s), on the job training, online courses, webinars, and previous work experience. This will help in showing how many things you have learned over time.

The next step is to begin to quantify all of your hours of experience. Now you’re no longer a design but a designer with over 10,000 hours of experience in a specific area.

Call Out Your Skills

Now that you’ve written down all of your previous work experiences you can begin to call out all of the unique skills you’ve learned from those experiences.

For example, I am a web designer, however, calling myself a freelance web designer doesn’t capture all of my skills even if I call myself a digital design strategist it still doesn’t capture everything I do. I used to work for a web hosting company so now I’m a digital design strategist who knows how to choose the best hosting environment I’ve also learned typography, color theory, search engine optimization and social media marketing.

I need to take all these unique skills and make sure I communicate them to potential clients and inform them that this is the vast knowledge of skills I’ll apply to their project even if I’m specialized I still have other skills that enhance my specialization.

It’s time for you to do the same think about the skills you’ve picked up along the way or the skills you want to learn and add that as a and include that as a part of your value.