Career Growth Secret – Part 2

In my last blog I outlined ideas for where to find your success stories, and how to determine which would be best for you to emphasize to support your career growth goals. Now we’re going to discuss how to develop them into powerful career growth tools! And you’ll want to start by asking yourself, “What are the skills most important to succeed with where I want to grow?”

For example, if you’re interested in a promotion to a team supervisor position in an accounting department you would ask yourself, “If I’m aiming for this type of job, what are the key skills they seek?” If there’s a job description, you can always look at what they consider to be the most important requirements.

A tip here: often when I ask people to articulate what they perceive to be the key skills for a particular position, they will default to what I describe as soft skills: communication, leadership, teamwork. Those are fine, and in some cases they are key skills, but almost always there’s what I would call a technical requirement in there. So if you’re leading an accounting team, you need to know something about accounting. That’s more of a technical skill. Don’t discount that because that can make the difference of you being considered seriously for a promotion or a job over someone who just is bringing to the table the soft skills. You should also consider your technology knowledge, being able to navigate software systems and work on different platforms, et cetera. Once you have given this some thought, ask yourself “If these are the key skills for this type of position, what success stories do I have in my career closet that are relevant to those?”

Let’s say you’re targeting a team leader, supervisor or manager position, but have never held that title before. Perhaps you’ve done volunteer work where you’ve headed up work teams. Or maybe while in school you headed up a project team. You can look for things that are related that would build your credibility and provide evidence toward what you are targeting. It doesn’t always have to come from a paid work experience.

Have some success story ideas? Great! Now let’s develop them into high impact examples that can help your career grow through a proven 3-step formula called What, How, and Proof.

When we’re working with clients on interview preparation, LinkedIn optimization, or resume development, we have them go through this process.

Let me go through an example:

WHAT: I recently helped a client land his dream job. That’s just an overview of what was going on. I had a client who had been job searching and was not making good headway. He contacted us and said, “Hey, I need some help,” and I helped him figure out how to be more successful with that.

HOW: Here you’ll describe the critical steps involved in executing your success example. Be careful to not hold back on details, thinking that the interviewer or the supervisor will already know the steps that are. By sharing the details you are showing your process and knowledge relevant to whatever it is you were trying to solve. With the client who I helped find his dream job, I discussed his career goal with him first and then I gathered some data from him, including 10 of these success stories that we’re talking about, that proved his worthiness for the role. Then, I put together a resume and LinkedIn that included those success stories in the content.

PROOF: Now, did it work? Yes! But I’ll get to that in a minute. For your own proof details, you’ll want to provide evidence that you succeeded. Metrics are ideal. In most cases, we can come up with some kind of metric. With this success story, for example, within two weeks my client had landed an interview with a target company and received an offer for a position that paid $20,000 more than he had made previously.

The metrics I have in here are the timeline, two weeks, and the increase in pay, $20,000 more. You can look for what kind of metrics you achieved. The importance of including that information is that the brain processes digits differently than words. It’s important to push yourself to define that metric.

Here’s a good checklist to follow:

• How have you maybe helped organization make money? I helped him make money. That was an example.
• Save money? I can make the case that I helped him save money because he was able to find a job faster and was able to earn more so he was saving on losses there.
• Improve quality? In my example, the quality of his search materials were raised, which helped him get an interview faster.
• Improve image? Improving the look and content of the client’s resume and LinkedIn profile did improve his image.

This make money, save money, improve quality, improvement image: that’s the filter to put your success stories through. You don’t have to address all of those areas, but you do want to get as many in there as you can.

Here’s another example, this one from a client who was targeting a digital marketing position.

WHAT: He took his company’s brand image from blah to wow!

HOW: He collaborated with key stakeholders on content, developed the design, got approval. He integrated things like SEO, maps, analytics, contact information for their 25 offices. He also executed user testing of the website using a third-party testing company to make sure that it worked well.

PROOF: The improvements resulted in a 35% increase of visitors to the site in the first year. He also earned ”Best Website: Complete Redesign” in an industry competition.

That one’s a really rich success story. In fact, we broke it out into three success stories on his resume. They were all relevant to his career growth target.

Let’s say you don’t have anything like that or you think you don’t have a success story on that scale. Here’s another one using a slightly different approach, this one for a client targeting a business operations manager position.

WHAT: This manager was responsible for preparing and getting approval on a $10 million, 300-line budget every year.

HOW: She would compare data from the previous two years, analyze trends, and then factor in weather patterns and commodity fluctuations. (I got goosebumps when I was writing about this one for her resume because who would think to factor in things like weather patterns and commodity fluctuation? Well, someone who knew what they were doing. I wouldn’t. But, that’s an example of why it’s important to share some of that how-you-did-it detail.)

PROOF: For 10 consecutive years she received approval!

I always say, “Success stories can be the difference between being perceived as mediocre versus being a rock star.” When I look at resumes and LinkedIn profiles, very often what I see is the mediocre content of, “This is what I do in my job,” but it doesn’t have the rock star pizzazz of, “Here’s some success stories for things that I’ve achieved.” So, it can really, really change the game for you by including that kind of information.