It's Time to Update Our Career Narratives!

All our careers consist of a collection of facts related to skills, experiences, and relationships. These contribute to tasks, projects, and organizations that produce results and outcomes. This collection of facts is good, but if not organized into a situationally relevant narrative or story, they are not effective. Worst, when we present these facts without a narrative structure, we leave it to others to apply a story to our facts, and we risk their making up an ineffective, or misrepresented, story. One's career narrative should not be left to chance.?

I bring this up to suggest that we all revisit the career narrative and story we have included in the “About Section” of our Professional Social Media profiles, from LinkedIn to Twitter to SLACK and beyond.

A story or narrative is defined as an account of what happened in such a way that the facts are connected in a cause-and-effect sequence that aids the listeners sense-making, often chronologically or thematically. They are almost universally organized into a three , Freytag says five , part structure that consists of a beginning, middle, and end. There is also a collection of largely agreed-upon elements of a story , which are helpful as a checklist in constructing our career narratives. When was the last time you took the facts of your career and formulated them into such a narrative structure? Those of us who have not, are losing the opportunity to be more clear and relevant in how you present our value and to expand the number of citizens who benefit from that value. This task is much easier talked about than executed.?

The more career facts we accumulate throughout a career, the more challenging it becomes to organize them into clear relevant narratives. After more than 3 decades of work, I have more career facts than I can easily sort, and when I do not both I and others are confused about my value. Too much is as harmful as too little in this regard. I have multiple stories, those of life sciences commercial operations professional, mental health advocate and educator, digital health strategist, business school professor, business administration and public health academic, and more. Yes, this is overwhelming.?

Sorting these stories and then knowing which to tell to which listeners in which situations is challenging but not insurmountable.?

My digital health strategist story is as such. “Across multiple waves of digital technological development in the life sciences industry over 3 decades, I have been effective in helping life sciences teams and firms capitalize on digital health research, strategy, and operations opportunities. During this time, I have contributed to addressing challenges related to change management, environmental analysis, resource identification, strategy formulation, operational execution, and analytics & optimization. This success has been as much about a capacity to learn as to leveraging what is already known. These experiences have contributed to the development and results of my stakeholder ecosystem. If digital health is an area of opportunity for your career or business, let's discuss how I can add value to the work you are doing.”

Above is a general competency story within which many supportive project-level stories exist that evidence this competence. When articulating these stories, the use of behavioral interviewing rubrics like STAR (situation, task/action, result) can be very helpful. The general story is well placed in the “About” section of your LinkedIn profile and the more detailed project-level stories are well placed in the “Project”, section of your LinkedIn profile.

Even as I write this, I recognize I am due for a revisit of my own career narrative, as well as writing competence-level narratives for the other storied roles I mentioned above. Changes in the environment and stakeholder needs make revisitation a constant, though periodic, need in our career management.??

I hope this prompt is helpful to you. I would love to see examples from readers. Let me know if you are interested in peer coaching sessions on this, and other, topic(s) related to Social Media for Career Success. Thanks for reading and continually spreading the word on our newsletter and our online course, Social Media for Career Advancement .??