Welcome. This is the first lesson of the course, and it's a gentle one.

Before we talk about CVs, jobs, or businesses, we start with you. The skills you already have. The things you love doing. What really matters to you at work.

Warm-up question: Think back to a time you finished something and felt genuinely proud. It might have been at work, or it might have been a Sunday dinner for ten people, or fixing a fence, or helping a neighbour through a hard week. What were you doing? Who was it for? Hold that memory in mind. We'll come back to it.

Four words you'll see all through this course. Read each one slowly. You don't need to memorise them. They'll come up again.

That's the vocabulary. Now we use it.

Now you build your own profile. There's no right answer and no marking. Take your time. Write what's true for you, not what you think sounds impressive.

You'll work through five short sections, then make an early decision about which pathway suits you next.

Take a moment with these. You don't need to type anything. Just sit with them, or talk them over with a friend, family member, or your library facilitator if you're in a group session.

1. Which strength on your list surprised you? Sometimes it's the soft skills built quietly over years that turn out to be the most valuable, the ones we forget to count.
2. Looking at your values, do they fit better with a job or with running something of your own? If you wrote 'security' and 'steady hours', that's a clue. If you wrote 'independence' and 'flexible hours', that's also a clue. Neither is better. They point in different directions.

There's no answer to submit. The question is the work.

Well done. That's Lesson 1 finished. Here's what you've done today:

• Listed 10 to 15 of your own skills, hard and soft, from paid work and from life.
• Named 3 to 5 interests, the things you actually enjoy doing.
• Named 3 to 5 work values, the things that matter most to you in a working day.
• Made an early decision about your pathway: a job, your own thing, or both.
• Written a short paragraph profile of yourself in plain language.

Why this matters: Almost every later lesson builds on what you wrote today. Your CV will pull from your skills list. Your interview answers will pull from your values. If you choose the entrepreneurship pathway, your business idea will be tested against the same lists. Keep the profile handy, you can return to it any time from the lesson menu.

Want to go further (optional, 5 minutes): Show your one-paragraph profile to one person who knows you well, a partner, a sibling, an old colleague, a friend. Ask them: 'Does this sound like me? What would you add?' Other people often see strengths in us that we miss. Their additions go on your skills list.

Next lesson, we look at your career story so far.