What are you trying to learn about yourself?
This is one of my favorite career exercises, and it is one I used as a people manager and leader.
I wanted to understand what people on my team felt they were good at, what they enjoyed, and what they wanted to learn. That helped me think about their career growth and how to balance their projects between established strengths and opportunities to develop.
You can use the same approach for yourself.
The purpose is to assess your relationship with your profession. You are looking at the different parts of the work and asking three separate questions: How much do I know about this? How well can I do it? How much do I enjoy it?
Those answers give you more to work with than a single judgment about whether you are good at your job. And as we develop this understanding of ourselves better, we can use this same information to really pinpoint the center of our craft.
What should you assess?
Start with the core competencies, focus areas, or responsibilities within your profession.
In product marketing, as an example, those might include messaging, buyer personas, product launches, go-to-market strategy, and sales enablement. Your profession will have its own list.
If you have not mapped those areas yet, start with the article on finding career options by mapping your profession.
You can also extend the exercise to the dimensions of your profession: activities, ways of working, audiences, business contexts, scale, and the other factors that shape your experience.
For now, beginning with your core responsibilities is enough.
Write them down, and give each one three separate scores:
| Focus area or responsibility | Knowledge | Skill | Enjoyment |
|---|---|---|---|
| An area of your profession | 1–10 | 1–10 | 1–10 |
The scale is relative to you. If you understand one subject much more deeply than another, its knowledge score should reflect that difference. You do not have to decide how you compare with the most accomplished person in your industry. What you marked as 10 should be the thing you’re most knowledgeable in, not whether you know more than anyone else.
A high score can identify one of your strongest areas without claiming that you know everything there is to know.
How do you assess your knowledge?
Knowledge is your understanding of the subject: what it involves, how it works, why certain approaches are useful, and what can go wrong.
One prompt I use is to imagine someone asking you to teach them about it.
Could you write about the subject or explain it in detail with very little preparation? Could you describe good practices, common mistakes, and the reasons behind your recommendations?
For example, could I talk for 30 minutes about buyer personas? Could I explain what they are, how to develop them, where they are useful, and what to be careful about?
Set aside whether you enjoy public speaking. That is a separate thing altogether. You could use writing or a conversation as your reference point instead.
In this exercise, being able to teach the subject is one sign I look for when assessing knowledge. The more you can explain beyond a basic definition, the stronger that knowledge may be.
How do you assess your skill?
Skill is about putting that understanding into practice.
Imagine someone hands you a project in that focus area with very little direction. How much could you take it from its starting point through to a useful result?
Using buyer personas again, suppose someone says:
“We do not have buyer personas. We have heard they might be valuable, and we want you to develop them.”
They do not know how to build them, what information is needed, or how the business would use them.
Could you work out what the company needs, plan the research, gather information, develop the personas, and help people use them? Could you produce something meaningful that makes a difference to the business?
The more confidently you can guide that work from beginning to end, the higher you would rate your skill.
At the low end of the scale, you might need someone to explain where to start, how to do the research, which questions to ask, and how to turn what you learn into something useful. That identifies where support and practice would help.
Working with others is still part of skilled execution. The distinction is how much guidance you need to carry out the work, rather than whether you can avoid asking questions or collaborating.
I deliberately separate knowledge and skill because their relationship gives us useful information. In development conversations, I often look for places where someone’s understanding has grown ahead of their practical experience. I also look for the reverse: familiar work someone can carry out, but cannot yet fully explain or adapt.
We will explore those patterns in another article. For now, give each its own score.
How do you assess your enjoyment?
Enjoyment asks how you feel about doing the work.
Are you interested? Engaged? Motivated? Does it give you energy? Would you look forward to a project where this responsibility was a substantial part of your work?
This rating is personal. Someone else might love the very work you would prefer never to do again.
It also needs context.
Before giving something a low enjoyment score, ask whether you dislike the activity itself or a particular experience of doing it. Working with people you found difficult, for example, may have affected how you felt about the whole assignment.
Would the work appeal to you more in a different setting or with a different approach? Note that distinction alongside your score.
There are also two kinds of enjoyment ratings you might record:
- Experienced enjoyment: You have done the work and know how you tend to feel about it.
- Anticipated enjoyment: You have seen, heard about, or learned about the work, and think you would enjoy it.
Both are useful. If you have not tried something, you can give it a high interest score. Just add an asterisk or a note so you remember that it is a possibility to explore, rather than an experience you have already confirmed.
Why do I give enjoyment so much weight?
When it comes to choosing what belongs at the center of your craft, I believe enjoyment is the most important of these three numbers.
Knowledge and skill tell you something about where you are today. Enjoyment helps you think about where you want to put your attention next.
When a subject interests you, you may find yourself wanting to read about it, try a different approach, challenge yourself, or talk through an idea with someone. You want to write about it. You want to teach it. A question about that subject can be the thing that lights you up.
That willingness to keep engaging with the work is something I look for when helping someone choose a development direction. It can give learning and practice a motivation beyond simply being told that you need to improve.
It does not mean every enjoyable activity will become easy or that skill develops automatically. It means there is something drawing you toward the work.
In my coaching, I also often see a connection between what someone enjoys professionally and who they are outside their career.
When we walk their career timeline, the enjoyable moments may come from very different jobs, yet share a similar shape. As I learn more about the person, those patterns often connect with their values, interests, and the way they approach the rest of their life.
That is part of the connection between identity and craft: the work gives you a way to express something that already matters to you.
Does enjoyable work have to be easy?
You will notice there is no difficulty score in this exercise.
You can find work extremely challenging and still want to do more of it. It may require sustained concentration, effort, and learning. You might finish tired while also feeling fulfilled and interested in what comes next.
That is different from work you resent, dread returning to, or feel no desire to understand more deeply.
When I think about the kinds of challenges I want a career to contain, I want room for the first kind: demanding work that feels meaningful and rewarding.
So when you rate enjoyment, do not automatically lower the score because something is hard. Ask how you feel about engaging with that challenge and what the experience leaves you with.
We will look more closely at difficulty and drain in another article. For this exercise, keep them distinct.
What should you look for in your scores?
First, complete the picture. Start with your competencies, and extend it to other dimensions of your profession if that helps.
For each area, record your knowledge, skill, and enjoyment separately. A short note about why you chose the score can help you remember the experience or context behind it.
This is a more extensive exercise inside my Career as Craft course in Innervates, where I guide you through the mapping, workbook, and scoring process. You can still begin with your own list and three columns.
For now, look across what you have written:
- Where is your knowledge strongest?
- Where can you execute with the most confidence?
- Which areas do you most enjoy?
- Where do those three things come together?
Areas where all three are high are promising candidates for the center of your craft. Areas where enjoyment is high but knowledge or skill is still developing can also be worth exploring. Keep any anticipated-enjoyment ratings clearly marked.
You do not need to turn every lower score into a problem to fix. The next step is understanding what the different patterns suggest, which we will explore in future articles.
For now, you are building a clearer picture of your relationship with your profession: what you know, what you can do, and what you want to keep growing into.
