How to share those success stories to land that job or promotion!

This is the time of year to which self-reflect comes naturally because it’s coming close to the end of the calendar year, your employer is going through the practice of employee performance review, or you might be interviewing for a new role. Whether you are reviewing your own goals, you know, the ones you set at the end of last year and claimed that these are the resolutions you will be keeping in the new year; or those your employer might have selected for you (with or without your engagement). Either way, it’s time to review your progress and outcomes.

Here is a secret for everyone: you can use the same format for collecting this information, whether the outputs will be used for your resume, an interview with a potential new employer, or your performance review with your current employer.

Start with collecting as many of these stories as possible. In the beginning, don’t worry about the details. Let us focus on stories that fall into the below three buckets:

• What are some of the things you accomplished that year?
• What challenged you, but you may not have been as successful as you wished and learned a valuable lesson?
• What was challenging, and you failed but also learned a lesson on how to do better next time?

The last two questions need to be clarified; why would a manager or future manager want to know about something I was unsuccessful in or failed at? Well, no one is perfect, so managers are looking that you were able to learn from those times of failure not to repeat the same faith, or the failure led to an evolution of the process that improved it for the future.

It’s time to start collecting the details for these stories, ideally in as many details as possible in the beginning. You can condense them into a smooth delivery as you practice their delivery.

Many large companies use the PAR/CAR/STAR/SOAR frameworks (for example,?https://www.1stprinciplegroup.com/1pgblog/2020/5/6/acing-a-behavioral-interview-with-a-soarstar-document ?or?https://interviewsteps.com/blogs/news/amazon-star-method ?or?https://thejobsauce.com/soar-framework-to-interview-successfully/ ?or?https://medium.com/@SeattleDataGuy/list/faang-interviews-7e63bb285ab0) ?but don’t let all those acronyms scare you. You can use several frameworks to put all the pieces together correctly, for many might think about What happened? How did you respond? Why was it a success or failure?

PAR: Problem, Action, Results

CAR: Challenge, Action, Results

STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Results

SOAR: Situation, Obstacle, Actions, Results

As you start to collect these stories, you will naturally end up with stories where you might have been one of many participants who completed actions to help accomplish the results. You do not want to take credit for the work of others, and you do want to ensure that you take credit for your actions and work. Here is an article that goes more into depth on the use of “I” vs. “we” in these stories (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/should-you-use-i-we-job-interviews-gerald-walsh/) because this is important to differentiate in your accounts.

As you document these stories, you want to be as detailed as possible in the beginning, and you can refine and make them more concise depending on the final use case (i.e., brief for resumes and detailed for interviews). While there are times that you have subjective/qualitative results, you want to have objective/quantitative results in the forms of #, %, or $ to demonstrate your results. (see?https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/have-soar-star-statements-prepared-your-next-rivera-l-i-o-n-/)

Need more coaching to help you get your career to the next level, reach out to me at?www.cpf-coaching.com ?or [email protected]

Story Originally published on https://medium.com/@cpf-coaching/demonstrating-results-for-reviews-interviews-and-more-par-car-star-soar-1943007cea08

Book of the Week

10% Happier, by Dan Harris

If finding bliss and nirvana has failed you, maybe finding the secrets to becoming 10% happier is the path to fulfillment. Find out how to do it here.

Click here to view this summary. If you would like to join my community of cybersecurity and business professionals as you look to grow your career, reach out to me [email protected]