Planning and Prioritising

One of the many Employability Skills. This skill is related to the self-management employability skill but is sometimes included as a separate attribute to emphasise external pressures on an individual and how manage these through good planning skills and the ability to prioritise tasks.

Can you show how you have managed to prioritise tasks and also how you have changed the priority of a task due to the changing work environment or due to a change in learning requirements? An example might be given of how changes that occurred in weather conditions required you to change the activity of surveying a site to that of staying in the office to continue with another report.

Alternatively, a more team-based example might be that of stopping what you were doing to help a colleague get important documentations photocopied, packaged and posted out by the last post.

Forward planning, where you think about the consequences of your activities and the sequence, they are carried out in will help an organisation manage their resources more effectively and efficiently.

If you have a plan of how you carry out your regular activities, you are able to demonstrate you have an understanding of the needs of the business. From the plan you will be able to identify the critical tasks, those that have to be done by a certain time, and those that could be put back without having too much of an impact on business operations. You are showing that you can prioritise by being well informed, you are not just having a guess and hoping for the best.

The transferable skills of prioritising, adapting to change and flexibility can often be captured in the statement that appears in person specifications as ‘Able to work under pressure to tight deadlines’?