Preppers: What Are Your Skills?

An SAS is a Simple Assessment of Skills, and anyone who’s serious about prepping needs to do it. In layman’s terms: what exactly can you do?

Maybe you’re a desk jockey, accountant, lawyer, teacher, or engineer used to working with paper and proposals. Or perhaps you are a hands-on person such as a mechanic, plumber, electrician, HVAC worker, or heavy equipment operator. Whatever you do, you have skills — but what are they, and how can they be applied to prepping?

The list of needed skills for a survival prepper is long–very long. You may be going it alone with family, or you may have joined a mutual survival group. You either have to do everything on your own, or share the workload with others who have their own skills to add.

But first, back to the original question. What can you do, solo, without any help from anybody else? Make an honest list. Most people realize they can do a lot more things than they thought they could, after they sit down to make a list.

Can you make plans, lists, organize thoughts, actions, and communicate them? Can you assess what supplies, gear, equipment, and essentials are needed to survive a month at home without power or water? Can you fix stuff, build stuff, and repair stuff? What tools do you have and know how to use? Can you grow food, process food, clean food, and cook it? Can you plan meals and calculate nutritional needs? Can you set a broken bone, clean a wound, suture a cut, treat minor illnesses, and administer meds? Can you load a gun, shoot it, disassemble it, clean it, fix it, and carry it all day? And so on and so forth.

Until you know what you know, you cannot figure out how to address the things you are missing. I guess that list may be long, too. So work on it. Take courses, attend seminars, improve on weak skills, ask friends to show you things, share your own skills in exchange for skills you do not have. Look at your tools, gear, and equipment. Obtain what you are missing.

Assess your own skills first, then add to them as soon as you can.

Dr. John Woods

Award winning outdoor writer/photographer since 1978. Over 3000 articles and columns published nationally. Field & Stream Hero of Conservation in 2007. Fields of writing includes hunting most game in American, Canada, and Europe, fishing fresh and saltwater, destination travel, product reviews, industry consulting, and conservation issues. Currently VP at largest community college in Mississippi in economic development and workforce training with 40 years of experience in Higher Education. BS-MS in wildlife sciences from MO. University, and then a PhD in Industrial Psychology. Married with two children and Molly the Schnoodle.