SWOT- Evaluate One's Personal Goals with Competitive Edge

SWOT- An Exercise to Evaluate One's Personal Goals with Competitive Edge

In my previous post Personal Branding, I discussed how Personal Branding is important to build a strong & influential profile for your target audience like employers, business clients, etc. To build such a profile or understand your Personal Brand attributes, you need to be aware of possible internal strengths & weaknesses as well as external opportunities & threats through SWOT.

A simple SWOT analysis will help you further to gauge what you do well and what you are lacking to minimize possible risks and take the best advantage of the chances in your way to achieve your desired goal successfully.

📂 Content:

1. SWOT- An Exercise to Evaluate One's Personal Goals with Competitive Edge

2. What is SWOT?

3. SWOT Analysis

4. An example of a SWOT analysis for a job seeking fresher

5. The SWOT Strategy

6. What is the purpose of SWOT analysis?

7. An exercise for your own SWOT analysis and building strategy

8. A real example of SWOT on personal experience

9. Related

What is SWOT?

In SWOT, the S stands for Strengths, the W stands for Weaknesses, the O stands for Opportunities and the T stands for Threats. Now let’s understand these four elements of SWOT. Strengths and Weaknesses are related to internal elements of one’s personality, whereas Opportunities and Threats are related to external elements.

SWOT Analysis:

SWOT analysis is to identify one's internal strengths and weaknesses and also the external opportunities and threats to make the best out of those four factors. Internal Strengths can be one’s Qualifications; Training; Certificates; Resources; Soft Skills; Technical Skills; Beneficial Values; Achievements; experience etc. Internal weaknesses can be one’s education or skill gap; bad habits; new technology not learned; traits criticized by others; skills to be improved to be efficient; financial/physical obstacles etc. External opportunities for one can be new technology that can be learned; people who can help you; courses or training to learn or improve skills; tasks or projects to volunteer which will be useful; current openings matching your skills etc. External Threats for one can be Professional or Personal obstacles preventing success; another with the same degree trying to get the same job; new technology; weaknesses; Unexpected accidents or events etc. Identifying all these is called SWOT analysis.

Here’s an example of a SWOT analysis for a job seeking fresher:

For a fresher, internal strengths can be identified as their university Degree; Computer Course; Soft Skills like Adaptability, Team Management, Responsibility, etc. Their internal weaknesses could be not having Advanced Computer Courses & Higher Educational Degrees; a Lack of Soft Skills like Effective Communication & Leadership Quality; Impatience etc. The available opportunities for a fresher could be Current Openings for Freshers; Free & Paid Skills Development Training & Courses; Open Admissions for Higher Education etc. The possible threats to them could be other candidates having the same educational qualifications & computer knowledge or with superior skills & experience; a large number of competitors; bad habits like failing deadlines etc.

Here’s the SWOT Strategy for the above-mentioned SWOT Analysis:

A SWOT strategy based on proper SWOT analysis helps one to build a proper plan for their mission or vision or have advantages in their target areas. The above-mentioned SWOT analysis shows the following strategy can be most effective to achieve the desired goal.
Strength-Opportunity Strategy: Identifying the company or organization giving the opportunity to use the maximum of identified strengths.
Weakness-Opportunity Strategy: Identifying the opportunities to take to minimize weaknesses.
Strength-Threat Strategy: Identifying all the ways to use strengths to minimize the identified threats.

Weakness-Threat Strategy: Identifying all the ways to minimize weaknesses to avoid identified threats.

Also note, SWOT Analysis is not only limited to helping with Personal Evaluation but also for other areas like Business Strategy; Company Productivity; Career Advancement etc.

What is the purpose of SWOT analysis?

SWOT analysis helps one identify the internal strengths to use those to overcome their weaknesses, also taking the best out of the external opportunities and avoiding the threats associated with them.

Here's an exercise for your own SWOT analysis and building strategy:

Think of one goal/ target you have currently in your life and comment below what is the biggest weakness and the biggest threat which may be an obstacle to achieving the goal and what is the most important/ efficient strength and the available best opportunity you have that might be helpful to avoid the threat and get success.

A real example of SWOT on personal experience:

For my current goal to help a maximum number of readers with my blog, here's my short SWOT analysis:

S- Experience in coaching people with diverse backgrounds; W- Timeliness; O- Previous & present job aspirants trained by me; T- engaged in multiple assignments.

Related

The next post is on Effective Communication Skills- To Impress & Influence to overcome the most common weaknesses/threats e.g. nervousness, lack of confidence, poor presentation skills, etc. identified in SWOT. Also, check the following for effective SWOT Analysis: Personal Branding- Promote The Brand "YOU"; Personal Branding- Identify Your Brand Color.

In the comment section, you are welcome to share suggestions that you may have for me to discuss or share.

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