Question: Looking Inside Yourself: What Is My Competitive Advantage? We encourage you to apply what you have learned about competitive advantage to your career. Spend a few minutes looking at yourself to discover your own competitive advantage. If you have previous work experience, these questions should be from a work environment perspective. If you do not have any work experience yet, use these questions to evaluate a new workplace or as strategies for presenting yourself to a potential employer.
1. Write down your own strengths and weaknesses. What sort of organization will permit you to really leverage your strengths and keep you highly engaged in your work (person-organization fit)? Do some of your weaknesses need to be mitigated through additional training or mentoring from a more seasoned professional?
2. Personal capabilities also need to be evaluated over time. Are your strengths and weaknesses different today from what they were five years ago? What are you doing to make sure your capabilities are dynamic? Are you upgrading skills, modifying behaviors, or otherwise seeking to change your future strengths and weaknesses?
3. Are some of your strengths valuable, rare, and costly to imitate? How can you organize your work to help capture the value of your key strengths (or mitigate your weaknesses)? Are your strengths specific to one or a few employers, or are they more generally valuable in the marketplace? In general, should you be making investments in your human capital in terms of companyspecific or market-general skills? Why should that distinction matter?
4. As an employee, how could you persuade your boss that you could be a vital source of sustainable competitive advantage? What evidence could you provide to make such an argument? If you are currently or previously employed, consider how your professional activities can help reinforce the key value-added activities in your department or organization.