Latest / Career Skills with Fexingo: Hard Skills, Soft Skills, and Future-Proofing Your Career / How to Audit Your Skills Like a Business Audits Its Books
Transcript
- Lucas: So I was talking to a friend last week — she's a marketing manager at a mid-sized B2B SaaS company. Smart, great at content strategy, runs a team of five. And she told me something that stopped me. Luna: What's that? Lucas: She said she recently realised she can't read a basic regression table anymore. Like, her team runs A/B tests, they report out metrics, and she's been nodding along for the past eighteen months while one of her junior people quietly interprets the results for her. She didn't even know she'd lost the skill until she tried to explain a test result to her CEO and froze. Luna: Ouch. That's a painful moment. But I bet it's more common than we think. We assume skills are permanent once we learn them, but they're more like muscles — if you don't use them, they atrophy. Lucas: Exactly. And that's what I want to talk about today — running a personal skills audit. Not the kind where you list everything you've ever done on a resume. I mean a systematic, honest review of what you actually know versus what you think you know. Like a business auditing its books. Luna: So how do you even start? I feel like most people would either overestimate themselves or spiral into imposter syndrome. Lucas: Right, that's the challenge. So I borrowed a framework from a strategy consultant I interviewed a few years ago. She categorised skills into four buckets: core, adjacent, decaying, and missing. Core are the things you're genuinely good at today. Adjacent are skills that are close to your core — you could pick them up quickly. Decaying are skills you used to have but haven't practiced. Missing are the ones you've never learned but need. Luna: I like that. It forces you to be specific. So for my marketing manager friend, her core might be content strategy and campaign planning. Adjacent could be something like SEO. Decaying is data analytics. Missing might be something like SQL or basic Python. Lucas: Exactly. And the key is to be brutal about the decaying category. Most people want to put skills they learned five years ago into core, but if you can't do the task without looking up a tutorial, it's decaying. My friend admitted she used to be able to build a basic regression model in Excel. Now she can't even interpret the output. Luna: So how do you actually run the audit? Like, what's the exercise? Lucas: It's surprisingly simple. Take a blank sheet of paper or a document. List every skill you use in your current role — and I mean every one, even soft skills like stakeholder management. Then rate each one on two dimensions: how important is it to your role right now, and how proficient are you? Use a scale of one to five. Anything below a three on proficiency that's above a four on importance — that's a red flag. Luna: And that's where most people will find their decaying skills. Because they've been coasting on past knowledge. I think there's also a psychological barrier — we don't want to admit we've slipped. Lucas: Exactly. And that's why it helps to have a framework. It depersonalises it. It's not 'I'm bad at this,' it's 'this skill has moved from core to decaying.' Once you name it, you can do something about it. Luna: So what do you do with the decaying list? Brush up? Or let it go? Lucas: That depends. If the skill is still relevant to your role, you refresh it. My friend decided to spend two hours a week on a data analytics refresher — she found a free course from a university that covers exactly what she needs. If the skill is no longer relevant, you can consciously deprioritise it. But you have to be honest about that, too. Luna: And the missing bucket — that's the scary one. Because you don't know what you don't know. Lucas: Right. So for missing skills, you need external input. Talk to your manager, a mentor, or even look at job descriptions for roles you want next. What keeps showing up? That's your missing list. For a marketing director, it might be budget forecasting or executive communication. Luna: I've also found that adjacent skills are the easiest to overlook. People think, 'I can't do that,' but actually they're one step away. For example, if you're a content writer, adjacent might be copywriting for ads. It's the same muscle, just a different format. Lucas: Great point. And that's where you can get the fastest ROI. Adjacent skills take maybe twenty to forty hours to develop to a useful level. Decaying skills might take a bit more. Missing skills — that's a bigger investment, sometimes months. Luna: So how often should someone run this audit? Lucas: I'd say quarterly. At least twice a year. The job market changes, your responsibilities change, and skills decay faster than we think. A study from the University of California found that without practice, technical skills degrade by about twenty to thirty percent per year. So if you learned SQL two years ago and haven't used it, you've probably lost half of what you knew. Luna: That's sobering. But it also means you can get ahead by just being consistent. A little bit of maintenance goes a long way. Lucas: Exactly. And here's a concrete takeaway — the exercise I described takes about thirty minutes. You can do it this weekend. I'd recommend writing it down, not just thinking about it. Then share it with someone you trust. Accountability helps. Luna: I'm actually going to do that. I've been meaning to assess my data visualisation skills — I think they're more in the decaying bucket than I'd like to admit. Lucas: Good for you. And if today was actually useful to you, the way these episodes stay ad-free is listener support. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a simple way to keep this going. Every bit helps. Lucas: So back to the audit — once you have your list, what's the next step? I think it's prioritisation. You can't fix everything at once. Pick the top one or two skills that are both important and weak, and set a specific goal. For example, 'by the end of next quarter, I want to be able to run a regression analysis independently.' Luna: And then you need a learning plan. Not just 'I'll learn it' — but what resource, how many hours per week, and how you'll test yourself. Lucas: Exactly. The audit is the diagnosis. The learning plan is the prescription. And then you re-audit in three months to see if that skill moved back into core. Luna: I think the biggest insight from this episode is that skills are not static. We treat our career like a set of permanent assets, but they're more like a garden — they need tending. Lucas: That's a great way to put it. And the audit is just the tool to see where the weeds are. So here's my challenge to listeners — do the thirty-minute audit this week. And if you find a decaying skill, pick one small action to start refreshing it. That's it. Luna: I'm in. I'll report back next episode. Lucas: Love that. Alright — thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.