Career Growth Secret – Part 3

You’ve got career growth on your mind, and you’ve identified and developed some success stories to help you achieve it. Kudos to you! Now I’ll share with you how to put those success stories to work.

PERFORMANCE REVIEWS: Let’s say you’ve got a performance review coming up and you want to be able to apply your success stories in that kind of application. You want to track your successes for the entire time period that you are being reviewed for. I think it’s a great idea to keep a success journal. We already talked about how you can go back over your status reports or a client management system to see what sorts of things you’ve worked on. If you can just get in the habit of when you have something happen that you go, “Yes, I did great on that,” just jot a quick little note in the success journal.

Then, go through the process of writing up the WHAT-you-did, HOW-you-did-it, PROOF-that-it-succeeded detail prior to your review. The upside to doing that in addition to helping you create what I describe as a success database is that it’s getting you in the mode of being able to describe it more successfully when you have your review. So if you verbally want to talk about it, you will have thought through what the most important details.

RESUME / LINKEDIN: Now let’s talk about how to apply these in resume and LinkedIn applications. First, back up any position descriptions that you may already have on your resume with specific relevant achievements. You have already thought through the process of what you want your resume to target. Then, just look in your career closet. Figure out which of your success stories are most relevant. This single step will raise you above 95% of job seekers. And choose your best and most relevant success stories to highlight in your LinkedIn profile and cover letter, too, including those specific metrics that we’ve been talking about.

JOB INTERVIEWS: As you are prepping for an interview, think through the five most relevant and impressive success stories for that position. When they ask you, “Give me an example of a time when you”, which is a behavioral-based interview strategy, and very popular over the past decade-plus, because it’s a good predictor of performance.

Keep in mind that they may not just come out and say, “Give me an example of a time when you’ve demonstrated your leadership expertise.” They may instead say, “Give me an example of a time when you struggled as a leader.” You can then take that success story that you’ve already articulated, dig in on it a little bit, and think about when you had a challenge in that situation, and use that as your example.

Wherever possible, offer a specific success story. So beyond when they may be saying, “Give me an example of a time,” you can look for opportunity to say, “Oh, I have an example that I can share related to this. Would you like to hear it?”

People love stories. They need stories. We hang on to stories. Let me go back and test this a little bit. How many line items were included in that $10 million budget that this one client had success with year after year? 300. And what kind of increase did that one client achieved with the web overhaul in terms of number of visitors to the site? 35. Chances are you remembered that, too. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. You have begun that step of increasing your career growth through success stories strategies.

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our services and how we may be able to assist you with developing key strategies for your next career search, email me at  Katy@careersolutionsgroup.net or call 970-224-4042.