Personal SWOT Analysis

In order to become a better person and to succeed in your personal and professional life, it's important to take moments to reflect on what is working and not working.

Personal SWOT analysis can be a nice exercise to brainstorm a particular moment in your life and improve yourself. You will need to understand your strengths, weakness, external threats and opportunities.

What is a personal SWOT Analysis?

The personal SWOT analysis is a powerful technique for judging a person condition and finding out the issues that it faces, along with the opportunities it has. The personal SWOT analysis is conducted as an exercise that is designed to gather four different aspects of a person.

Namely:

  • Strengths
  • Weaknesses
  • Opportunities
  • Threats

Learning these four aspects is a good gauge on finding the current condition of yourself while also figuring out where you are headed.

A personal SWOT analysis can be a simple and short exercise. It’s a look into yourself and covers most factors that are influencing your condition at that point in time.

Strengths - You will need to look into what sets you apart.

  • What are your competitive skills
  • What is your experience
  • What are your best abilities and that differentiate you from your peers?
  • Try to list as many strengths as you can

Weaknesses - You will also need to look into the things that are your weaknesses.

  • Things that you are not comfortable in doing
  • Things that you consider boring and you have a hard time doing
  • Things that people usually complain about you
  • Things that your boss wants you to improve
  • Missing skills and knowledge

Opportunities - Opportunities you can explore.

  • You can list external opportunities in your company and project
  • New career paths that you can take
  • Different things you can do to improve yourself and your work
  • Training courses and mentoring opportunities
  • New projects and shifts in your life

Threats - Threats that you face from the current market conditions, internal departments, technical challenges, etc...

  • Company changes and market changes
  • World changes
  • New technologies or skills on your job

Personal SWOT Analysis Examples

Strengths

  • Good communication skills
  • Graduated in Marketing
  • Easy to work with other people
  • Proactive

Weaknesses

  • I find it very hard to do tasks involving math
  • It's difficult to plan my future

Opportunities

  • Become a senior professional
  • Free online course about coaching

Threats

  • Digital marketing is changing fast
  • Need to learn about machine learning in writing
personal swot analysis example

Opportunities of a person

Personal opportunities: The things you want to achieve, or the things you’d like to change about yourself. Our personal opportunities for learning, growing and improving are endless. But sometimes we get stuck in our comfort zone and fail to recognize the opportunities that are right in front of us.

How to do a personal SWOT Analysis?

Carrying out a personal SWOT analysis can be done via post-its in your home or office. It's a simple exercise and it can be done multiple tiles during the year, so you can see your progress and how you improved.

Online tools such as EasyRetro also offer another way of doing a SWOT analysis and helps you in keeping track. Running a single Activity on EasyRetro means that you conduct a single SWOT meeting and store the results of the session. You will be able to do a brainstorming session where you will compile and write down your thoughts. Finally, the cards that are more import to you can be put up for review and actions can be created.

1 - Brainstorm

You should write everything you can think of on the specific categories for the SWOT analysis.

2 - Reflection

This is the section where you will be able to vote for certain ideas. At the end you should be able to reflect in it and create action items on how to improve or how to take advantage of your opportunities.

At the end of the activity, you will have a stack of creative and unique ideas that put together will contribute to the progress of your project and yourself in the future.

Why should you do a personal SWOT Analysis?

The personal SWOT analysis method has numerous immediate and long-term benefits, including:

  • Creating action items to improve yourself
  • Creating new possible pathways to successful projects
  • Improving yourself and your career

Personal SWOT Analysis Template

You can create a free personal SWOT analysis template right now. You will also be able to export it to JPEG, PDF and spreadsheet formats in the end of the exercise.