"I haven't got the skills you need to get the jobs that are available."

1. Then why don't you take a course and try to learn them or improve them? Education and training are very useful things to do when unemployed - you may learn new skills that will get you a new job, or, even if not, you make yourself more employable: employers are not so keen on people who've just sat around unemployed and done nothing. Taking a course shows you're trying to help yourself, keeping your mind alert, and so on. That way you won't have a big white space to explain on the application form or your CV when you apply for your next job.
2. This may not be true at all. It's the reason why some unemployed people stay unemployed - because they think their skills and experience are only relevant to one kind of job. This is partly because we think in terms of jobs and not skills.

Try the following exercise:

What skills do you use in your own home and within your own family, outside of "work"?

List seven of them below (e.g. "prepare food for cooking") and see what we came up with:

Our ideas:

We thought of seven activities in the home that involve skill - i.e. you need to learn how to do them, and it takes practice to do them very well.

• manage money and keep to a budget

• planning ahead (e.g. the meals for a week or for the next day)

• look after a building and its contents

• look after children

• clean a house and wash and iron clothes

• organise and cook several daily meals

• use, and sometimes repair, machinery, including electrical or electronic equipment

You will have thought of many more. You don't get paid for these things but all of them are skills that people do get paid for "at work" - accountant or administrator, hotel or restaurant manager, caretaker, nursery nurse, cleaner or laundry worker, chef, electrician or computer operator, to name but a few! Even if you've been out of "work" for a long time, the chances are you're still using lots of skills every day, just to survive. Yes, you might need to build on them and improve them, but you aren't starting from scratch

Now think about the most demanding job you did. What were the main tasks and what skills did they need? Type them in here:

Use it as evidence next time you apply for a job and they ask what you can do. Use it when you feel depressed about yourself - there are lots of things you can do - it's just that people won't always pay you for doing them. Or will they?

Here's a final quiz. How much do you know about jobs? Can you find at least two different jobs where each of the following skills would be used?

• mending equipment
• speaking a foreign language using everyday phrases
• giving first aid
• changing the wheel on a car
• preparing food
• calculating a percentage
• finding your way by using a map
• writing notes on a conversation you had with someone

Place cursor on the skill for our suggestions to appear.

Many skills can be useful in more than one job - what you did in your last job, even what you do at home, may be something you can do in your next job too. They are "transferable skills". You have done it before, you did it well, you may be able to do it again. And you should add it to your CV if you think it is evidence that you could do part of a job you haven't done before.

Check out more of your skills by using the Skills Questionnaire