Self reflection report - SWOT Analysis

A SWOT Analysis is a great tool to identify your personal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Therefore, I created a SWOT framework, started to think about my personal skills and asked my colleagues at university and my girlfriend what they think about me. These are the results:

Strengths:

My girlfriend says, one of my greatest strengths is planning and organizing. When I will go on holiday with her, the first thing I do (after we have decided for a country and city) is comparing prices of flights, accommodation and maybe a rental car. Then I google for information about the country and city and what we can do there. After that I create a time schedule with departure and arrival time, when do we have to leave to the airport and so on. Because of that my friends know that I’m very punctual and reliable and I take responsibility for the things I plan, organize and do. I think I developed these skills during my eight years of work as a soldier for the German Bundeswehr. There, I also learned to live and work independently with a high level of commitment. I moved a lot and lived and worked also for 2 ½ years in France. I met a lot of different people from everywhere in the world and I liked it to exchange my knowledge and experience with them. This was also one cause why I decided to study in the Netherlands. To put it in a nutshell I would say that I am open minded and do not have fears to get in touch with other people and cultures.

Weaknesses    

One of my biggest weakness is, that I do not like to wait for somebody. I think this has to do with my strength of being punctual and reliable. If we had have to do a group homework for example, I was almost always the one who finished his part at first. When I asked my group mates about their processes, the answer was nearly every time the same: Why hurry, we got still one more day left. So I took their parts as well, wrote the text on my own and told them that they only have to look for mistakes. Therefor I come to my next weakness and this is overambitious. I always want to do everything perfect and deliver high quality. For example if we work on a project presentation, I like to search for more background information, graphs, figures, articles and so on. I collect them, load them up and tell my group what it is all about. They often feel to be dumbfounded by me because I looked for to many things which would not fit into the presentation. This leads to my last weakness: Sometimes I think too complicated.

Opportunities

The next opportunities that will rise up to improve my weaknesses will be my study abroad in Finland and of course the internship in a company. It think that these two will broaden my horizon and I will collect a lot of new experiences. Another opportunity would be the changing of the project group. If we could decide on our own with whom to work with, I would prefer a group which goal is also to get in 8.0 instead of a 6.0.

Threats

My friends have identified two threats. The first one is that I am very bullish. Sometimes I want to insist so hard on my own opinion that I do not accept another and better solution. The second one is my anxiety about the future. When I look on my CV I know that I have a lot of experiences and knowledge but I do not know if it is sufficient to get a good job after I completed the bachelor course and maybe they do not want to have someone who is almost 31 years old. The next thing is, that it is hard for me to learn names. When I get introduced to someone, it could be that I forget the name after only half an hour. This will be a threat especially in my business career later, therefore I have to find a method to train remembering names more efficient.