What is a Personal SWOT Analysis, and Why Is It Essential?

SWOT

Personal development is essential for making yourself more appealing to employers or customers. It also boosts your self-image, self-esteem as well as self-confidence. We all have strengths; a personal SWOT analysis help to configure your strength and allow you to align them with valuable opportunities. People apply many tricks to stand out in the sea of competitors. They usually want to secure a top position, although it is not as easy as it sounds.

Self-analysis is often used in emerging strategic plans and assessing individual project conditions. You may be more familiar with the term SWOT analysis than a business tool. SWOT analysis helps you assess your projects and examine your organization’s internal and external environments. SWOT analysis is also helpful for the fresher candidates searching for an opportunity and those looking to climb the career ladder.

Reasons for Personal SWOT Analysis:

When conducting a personal SWOT analysis, think about your goal to achieve. A personal; SWOT analysis provides insight based on your personality strengths, predictable challenges, and opportunities you can maximize in chasing career goals. If you can understand your strengths and opportunities, you will be well-informed on where to footstep with confidence and security.

If you also realize your weakness and fears, you can focus on planning to overcome that fear. Performing a SWOT analysis will help quicken your personal development and realize that you understand your professional situation in detail. It also helps you to understand ideas about how you can present your strengths and fear at the time of the interview. While you grasped self-analysis, you can easily understand the methodology for different situations like planning a career change, managing your official task, or planning some strategies to establish your start-up.

What is Personal Analysis?

A personal SWOT analysis consists of all the positive or negative factors, internal or external. This personal Analysis is used in many situations, such as defining a career path, calculating an adequate performance, or deciding how to design a product.

A personal SWOT makes the processes simple, visual, and actionable. The internal factor is the contribution in a situation you put, such as your strength and weakness. These may relate to expertise or experienced, your hard or soft skills, personal habits, etc. on the other hand, the external factors are those that a situation contributes, such as opportunities and threats. These may relate to the organization’s work culture and prospects of the influence of the other co-workers, managers, and competitors. SWOT stands for:

  • Strength
  • Weakness
  • Opportunity
  • Threats

A Guide to personal SWOT analysis:

Businesses often use a SWOT analysis to realize their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Like that, you can also use a personal SWOT analysis to understand yourself to make a well-versed decision after evaluating a situation. If you are well informed about how to make a personal analysis will help you in all aspects of decision-making in your career path. Here, I will discuss the steps of a personal SWOT analysis.

What are personal weakness examples?

Think of what is preventing you from achieving your goals. You must understand a real weakness that you struggle with that prevents you from achieving your objective in your life.

Weakness doesn’t mean something negative but means there is a way to progress and improvement. Understanding your weakness will help you in many ways –in your personal and professional life. I am listing here some types of common weaknesses that may be found in human beings:

  • Greedy
  • Selfish
  • Shy
  • Lazy
  • Afraid
  • Passive
  • Impatient
  • Easily bored
  • Delegating tasks
  • Unorganized
  • Close-minded
  • Impulsive
  • Gives blame on others

How to create a personal SWOT analysis diagram?

  • Step1:  Open a new document in MS Word
  • Step2: Then add a text box selecting the insert tab
  • Step 3: Select Draw Text Box
  • Step4: You have to create quadrants, hold shift and drag your mouse to make a square
  • Step5: You can copy the existing text box by Ctrl+C to add additional text boxes. Then hold shift to select two boxes. Then select Format>Align> Align Top.
  • Step6: you have to repeat the abovementioned steps to make full boxes of four. You have to make two-by-two diagrams; for this, use the Alignments tools in the Drawing Tools Tab. You can colour your boxes to make them attractive. MS Word has pre-built themes to choose a colour from that will appear automatically when you right-click on the shape.
  • Step7: start typing in the corresponding text box in the quadrants to add titles. You can set the text alignment from the Home tab to make the presentation attractive.
STRENGTH
Your first strength
Your second strength
Weakness
Your First weakness
Your second weakness
Opportunities
Your First opportunities
Your second opportunities
Threats
Your First threats
Your second threats
Personal SWOT Analysis Diagram

How do you write a SWOT analysis about yourself?

Personal SWOT analysis contains four key points:

Internal Factors:

  • Strength
  • Weakness

External factors:

  • Opportunities
  • Threats

To analyze these factors involves a series of questions that you have to answer yourself regarding internal and external factors to reach your goal.

List down your strengths:

  • What do you do well than someone else?
  • What strength do other colleagues see in you?
  • Have you completed any campaigns? If yes, what are those?
  • What personal resources can you operate?
  • Which are your most desired achievements?
  • What values do you have that others fail to exhibit?

Know your weakness:

  • What speech do you avoid because you don’t feel confident doing them?
  • Do you have any bad habits? If yes, what is that? i.e. lazy, poor communication skills, getting late, etc.
  • Are you confident about your education, training, and skills? If not then you can take proper training on that.
  • Do you have personality traits that hold you back in your way?
  • Do other people see weakness in you that you couldn’t?

Find your Opportunities:

  • In which area is your industry growing?
  • What new impactful skills can you adopt to enhance your skill portfolio?
  • Does your company grow? If yes, how can you take advantage of that?
  • Can you make a solution for your organization that is suffering presently?
  • Are any of your competitors failing to do some critical task? If yes, can you take advantage of their mistakes?

Keep an eye on Threats:

  • Do you have competition in your organization? If yes, then who?
  • What are the barriers currently affecting your role?
  • Can your personal traits hamper your career advancements?
  • Does changing technology pressurize your position?
  • Does your personal weakness lead to threats?

Performing this Analysis will often offer essential information – it can point out what needs to be done and put problems into standpoint.

An example of Personal SWOT analysis:

Here are some excellent personal SWOT analyses you can use as a SWOT analysis model.

The SWOT analysis of Riyaz, who is a digital marketer:

Strengths

  • I am very creative. I can impress my client with a new perspective on their brands.
  • I can ask questions to find the right marketing angle.
  • I am fully committed to the success of my client’s business.

Weakness

  • I get nervous while presenting my ideas and thoughts to my clients.
  • Sometimes I feel bored doing the same type of tasks regularly.
  • I have no experience in the SEO field.

Opportunities

  • I will attend a marketing conference next month that will offer training seminars.
  • Our Director is on an extended leave, and he appointed me to cover his duties, which would be a more significant career opportunity for me.
  • Lots of chances to communicate with the other staff from which I can gain essential and relevant knowledge and hospitality.

Threats

  • People with better SEO skills are doing better than me.
  • Due to the recent staff shortage, I am often overloaded with tasks
  • I don’t have a good team leader.

By identifying the possible threats that can affect the organization, Riyaz can abolish them as much as possible.

Abstract:

As you can see in the article, a personal SWOT analysis offers action steps, laser focus, and a great insight into your career path.

Therefore, a personal SWOT analysis is well-thought and well-executed. When your SWOT analysis is completed, you will know which step you should take next.

It would be best if you remember that the most self-realization you have, the better way you can use your talents to the fullest extent. On the other hand, if you have control over your weakness, they don’t become a long-term barrier to your career goal.

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