Discovering Your Knacks

I’m working on finishing up a learning and networking adventure I began last week. I have finished Harvard Business Review magazine on creativity and finished reading a PDF document titled “Redefining Readiness” (learning during the age of the 4th industrialization), and I’m in the midst of the Robert Mueller’s report. I haven’t finished reviewing the Never Stop Learning and writing up my notes and thoughts on it. I’m trying to finish up all of my readings before embarking on new ones.

In addition, last week I received an email from Knack about a new app that they have and urged me to download it and discover what it could tell me about my skills. Knack is a company that uses AI and gamification to identify what skills, personalities, and temperament you display and what kind of jobs you would be best suited for. Knack also plays a role in connecting companies with students and job seekers, through the use of this gamification. Lately, their emails have been describing their efforts around the world, especially in countries where there is a lot of poverty, to introduce poor students to opportunities: India and Africa comes to mind. In the US, they do a lot of work for disadvantaged students to encourage companies to consider them as potential hires.

The Knack app is a very interesting concept, and a few years ago around 2013 when I heard about it, I had to try it out.

My 2013 Knacks

I must admit, that while their assessment was probably correct, being described as dutiful, sensible, deliberate came across as boring in my mind. It was disappointing; I didn’t want to be described as a rule follower (although that’s probably correct, unfortunately) – I wanted to be more than that. Insightful and Informed was more my idea of exciting: thinking out of the box, creativity, abstract thinking, novel ways of doing things. In my mind, I was a mixed of blah and exciting potential.

So when that email came with an announcement of a new app, I just had to try it out. I figured 6 years later, Knack must have done many more machine learning so its AI may be even better. And maybe in the interim I have become more intriguing.

My 2019 Knacks – Top 3

Well, the results were surprising, nothing like what I expected. I am much happier because there are skills/temperaments that I’m going to need for the robot era but still no creativity. Ah well, at least I’m not a dutiful person.

One astonishing result is that it turns out I have a LOT of people skills. As a matter of fact, my top three skills were people skills. I hadn’t realize I had such strength in that area. What happened to my analytical, logical, mathematical type skills? Or creativity?

My Other 2019 Knacks

I do have a “Computational Mindset” which turns out to be a good 21st Century skill; another good 21st century skill is “Multicultural Intelligence”. And I have leadership skill which is “Inclusive Leadership”. All of those I’m really happy to have.

My 2019 Career Knacks

My range of possible careers run from Data Science and STEM through Business Executive, Investment Banking, Public Relations and Marketing on through Journalist, Pharmacist and Physician. The range is interesting. All of these types of careers are more corporate types, entailing higher education, which makes sense since I lean toward the intellectual, collegiate thinking.

Now because my people skills were so surprising and my top three skills were all people related, I’m wondering if they just happened to be my top skills but when compared to others, they are actually below average. In other words, they are my top three but they won’t stand out when compared to others around the world. And the rest of the listed skills are in even worse state in rank stacking. If that’s true, then I’m hosed.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep working on my people and digital skills and continue plugging away at the creativity and resilience and charm and ….

If you are interested in this kind of thing, go to Apple Store or Google Play (?) and download KnackApp and start playing.