As a job seeker, you need to validate your skills. There are many different ways you can validate your skills. In this post, I will go through the 8 ways you can prove and validate that you have a specific skill.

When it comes to skill validation, you need to give proof that you can carry out a task and do it with specific limitations in resources. This can be previous work experience, education in the field or freelance work. There are eight different ways you can validate your skills:

1. Work Experience

This is perhaps the most obvious one for most job seekers and yourself. What’s important is that you provide specific tasks, responsibilities, and duties that you held. In your CV, this should be the first part of personal information and summary. Most employers are more interested in your work experience, rather than what education you have. Especially, if you have a long career. Also, these should be ordered in reverse chronological order, i.e. most recent experience first.

2. Formal Education

This one is also pretty obvious. One challenge though, you would need to translate your education into something that Swedish employers will understand. Sometimes the English name works, other times it might be better with a Swedish name that the employer knows well.

The easy way to do this is to send a copy of your degree to UHR, just go to this website and it will guide you through the process. The result of going through the process will be that your degree is verified in Sweden. This means you can show the employer this validation and also apply for courses at University. The process from your side is very straight forward, you just need to supply your documents and you get a great reward for doing so.

3. Massive Open Online Courses

While hunting for a job, why not take up a course to continue to develop your skills? Over a decade ago, the world’s top universities have been started providing their courses for free to the public online. These courses, called Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), are a great way to both develop new skills and validate skills that you have. There are plenty of great sites collecting courses like this. Here are two of the biggest ones:

• Coursera
• edX

4. Freelancing

One of the best ways to show off your skills is to actually get paid for work. You can register a profile on a freelance platform, and start doing projects for customers today.

These finished projects will be a  great validation of your skills. Helping develop a portfolio, showcasing the value you provide. Here are some sites where you can find freelance work:

• Upwork
• Fiverr

If you want, you can target Swedish employers on these sites. At the moment of writing this, there are 622 employers in Sweden looking for freelancers on Upwork for instance. Feel free to create a profile on Upwork today and start to validate your skills with projects.

5. Skills Tests

At Upwork, they have tests for freelancers so that you can see how well you score in comparison to others. You can find these tests here. Upwork has a bunch of tests that you can take in pretty much any type of industry. They are quite fun and gives you an idea about how good you are at something compared to other professionals in that field.

6. Internships

An internship is a very common way to validate your skills in Sweden. It could be anything from a couple of weeks to months or half a year. It is used to validate the skills that the person has or develop new skills. The good part is that anyone can do an internship. Whether you have a work permit or not.

7. Volunteer Work

Basically, any type of work that you have done for free, that will show you have a specific skill. Such as working for non-profit organizations, sports teams, or even helping companies with something.

This is also an area where you can find tons of opportunities here in Sweden. Every village and city in Sweden have a sports association and other types of non-profit organizations (ideella föreningar or simply föreningar are the Swedish names). These are great places to meet new people, develop and validate skills.

Even soccer clubs that are playing in the higher levels have volunteers that do part of the work. Like checking tickets in the entrance, selling coffee, and the alike.

If you want to find your local soccer club, you can use this site where you can find soccer teams that you can provide some volunteer work for.

This site called Volontärbyrån is also great. The site collects a lot of different volunteering opportunities throughout Sweden.

Feel free to look for volunteer work. It will help you a lot to have some experience from Sweden on your resume.

8. Projects

Something very valuable is to team up with people and be a part of a project on something like a Hackathon. There is something called Startup Weekend. In these events, you build a project in a weekend and then share it with the world. The three days contain activities such as pitching your idea, building your project and meeting other people to work together with.

Click here to see the next Startup Weekend in Stockholm. Keep in mind that these events are not only for developers. Anyone interested in starting a project with others can participate, as a variety of skills are needed in a team to get the project done.