There’s no denying to the fact that Internships help you start early in life. But since companies are offering you opportunities to learn in the professional environment without you not being academically eligible yet, they expect something in bilateral too.
Even if you aren’t too well with the practical work, your employer expects, rather needs you to be versed with some innate or ‘learnt-with-time’ qualities. One of them which counts as a really important aspect of your intern resume is whether you have self-management skills.
Contrary to what is generally assumed, self-management isn’t just about time management, but much more. Let’s try to understand it from the scratch.
What is Self-management?
Self-management is a key employability skill that will not only help you as an intern, but throughout your career and life. Primarily it does mean managing your time efficiently but from a broader perspective, there are many aspects attached.
How to Develop Self-management skills
To really develop self-management skills for your career, you need to work out on a few important points. Here’s a brief guide to start off with the same.
1. Setting Goals
You can only manage your work well when you know exactly what your work is. Setting goals aren’t only for a lifetime or let’s suppose, for a decade. You can set goals for the end of the week, or even for the day. Be prepared with the list of goals or things you need to cover up within a day, week, or month. It helps in efficient management of tasks.
2. Prioritisation:
Right next to setting goals is prioritising these goals. There can be many things you need to do at once, but practically that’s not possible. Therefore, prioritise what needs to be done first and so on. It not only helps in healthy management of tasks but keeps your mind focused on one thing at a time.
3. Develop listening habits:
How many times have you answered a question wrong in the examination because you didn’t read or try to understand the question properly at the first go? Or how many times have you done the wrong thing because you didn’t understand the task-at-hand properly?
That’s exactly what you need to change. Develop listening habits to enhance your work potential. It helps in doing a task right the first time, so you don’t have to keep on correcting it. It might take an additional two minutes to understand the task, but will save you hours of re-doing or rectifying the work done.
4. Do not procrastinate:
This habit is something we develop more sharply during our college days but exactly the habit that eats up our work potential a great deal. Procrastinating makes your tomorrow busier and hence messed up. Doing the right work at the right time is what self-management is. Develop a habit of doing your tasks as soon as possible.
5. Work out your stress:
A key to do things right on time is to be able to manage your stress. One of the primary reasons why employers look for a candidate with self-management skills is this. There will be times when you will have so many things to manage within a stipulated time. Stress can further mess it up. Therefore, you need to work towards managing your stress even in difficult situations.
6. Learn to control your emotions:
Don’t let your emotions dominate how your behaviour towards other people or situations. Though that doesn’t mean being fake. Express your emotions honestly and accurately where it is appropriate. But don’t let emotions like anger and dislike for particular people in your work environment effect your work output.
Apart from the above-mentioned characteristics, you need to work out on your intra-personal and communication skills as it reflects how managed you can act as a team. You can develop these skills only by following the very aspects we just talked about. So, start today and see how it works wonders for your intern resume!
If you liked this, we recommend reading the following pieces from our series on how to prep yourself with intern-worthy skills, for an intern-worthy resume:
How to Show Self-Management Skills on your Intern Resume
How to show problem-solving skills on your intern resume
How to Show You’re a Team Player, on your Intern Resume
How to fill in gap months/years on your intern resume!
Intern-worthy skills: 20 ways to improve your communication skills
Self-management is really important in life, no matter what job you are doing.
Really Great!! I must say self-management is much necessary. Thank you for sharing these tips to develop the one.
Your info graphic is quite easy to understand as to what is self-management. Meeting goals and being organised are only part of the self-management skills there is also time management and working hard for achieving the goals. You would learn about all these soft skills when you enrol for executive courses.