Exploring personal strengths lesson

These activities are designed to help young people learn how their aspirations, skills, personality traits and interests can lead them to making rewarding career choices. You can also use this lesson as a prompt for students to start considering next steps and to inspire research into qualifications needed for jobs they have not previously considered, as well as routes to employment including further/higher education, apprenticeships and T Levels.

Identifying the skills they already have can help students strive for success in their education, as well as providing focus on which skills they could improve at, to help them with their next step. 

The resources on this page support your teaching of these skills through an independent activity or a full length, curriculum-linked lesson plan:

Teaching resources:

• Exploring personal strengths for employment: Lesson plan and presentation slides – full lesson plan including icebreaker for use with a group of students in the classroom
• Skill up icebreaker activity – 10 minute game to play with a class
• Spin the Wheel of Strengths: Interactive worksheet – interactive worksheet activity for independent learning whether remote or in class

Lesson plan

(60 - 75 minutes)

The activities in this lesson involve a combination of personal reflection and working as a group to identify strengths while relating these to aspirations. This includes highlighting the difference between realistic and more ambitious goals. Students will identify what their interests, strengths and personality traits are before considering what they need to improve.

The lesson also includes a short ice breaker game called ‘Skill Up’, which can be played in 10 minutes as a standalone activity. Skill Up presents the link between different jobs and the associated skills and qualities for people in those roles in a fun, visual way.

Lesson learning outcomes

By the end of the lesson, students will be able to:

• Recognise three key elements of their personality
• Explain how different job roles require a range of skills, interests, and personality traits
• Identify ways of building an accurate self-image that can guide successful career choices

Icebreaker activity

(10 minutes)

The Skill Up icebreaker activity is a quick, fun and engaging game that gives students an insight into the skills, personality traits and interests that are commonly found in different job roles. It also encourages them to research other industries and job roles and write down the skills essential for those.

This team activity can be used as a starter to the above lesson plan or as a standalone icebreaker activity. You could also use it at the end of the lesson to summarise what students have just learnt about their own personal strengths for employment.

Interactive worksheet

(35 minutes)

Please note that students below the age of 14 cannot sign up for their own LifeSkills account. Any independent tasks must be printed or downloaded and provided digitally for them to complete as they are currently hosted on educator pages.

Please note this activity might not be suitable for those students under 14 years as it talks about exams, CVs and part-time jobs.

Get step by step support for students as they Spin the Wheel of Strengths in this interactive worksheet, which introduces some of the themes from the full lesson plan, and will help students identify their own skills, and see how they transfer between different jobs using our popular interactive tool, the Wheel of Strengths. The worksheet can be printed or completed digitally to develop a connection between building transferable skills and good career choices. You might choose to assign it:

• As homework following the Exploring personal strengths for employment lesson
• For independent study
• For remote learning 

How to identify personal strengths with LifeSkills

Try the activities around Recognising and building personal skills to take the learning from this lesson to the next step by getting students thinking of ways to improve their skills. The Putting enterprise skills into action activities will be helpful for students actively thinking about how to put their personal strengths into practice. For more information on the range of resources and how they can be used in PSHE lessons and more, check out our Content guide.

Why not try one of the related lessons below next? Or for more virtual work experience resources to use yourself or to share with teachers, young people, parents or others, visit our virtual work experience hub.