Articulating your accomplishments: 5 ways to do it!
5 ways to articulate your accomplishments
Whether for your resume or reporting as part of your job, it’s important to know how to articulate your accomplishments. Rather than focusing on what you were supposed to do (like in a job description), accomplishments help you focus on what you have already accomplished. In resumes, this is what sets you apart from other candidates applying for the same job.
While this is meant to compliment writing an effective resume, it can surely be very useful for other purposes as well, including but not limited to: performance reviews with your manager, organizational performance review with external stakeholders, or even as part of your professional summary or Elevator Pitch. Here I will discuss with you five ways to write down your accomplishments (in an ascending order of impact).
1. The job description
This is the most common format of writing accomplishments, because it highly relies on filtering out those job description responsibilities you’ve had as well as additional ones that were given to you, throughout your experience. These can focus on highlighting the different functional areas you were involved in, operations you were in charge of or teams you’ve worked with. You can think of this format as a way to look at things horizontally and highlight the breadth of experience you have.
While this is straightforward, relying on it alone will not differentiate you from those seeking jobs with similar background as you. However, it is always good to start with it as it provides you with easy and quick information to list down and start with, before exploring other ways of writing your accomplishments.
2. Chronologically (the full cycle from start to finish)
While many might see this format as too narrow, it is very powerful in showing competence and expertise in a certain area of focus. This format focuses on laying out all the chronological elements of a certain operation or activity. While the previous format focuses on showing breadth of your experience, this one will help emphasize its depth. It will help you emphasize your ability to take something through, all the way, throughout all of the required stages (from start to finish).
Let’s consider recruiters for example, taking requirements from the business, searching, job posting, resume screening, interviewing (or facilitating with the business), assessing and sending out job offers. This is an example of a recruiter which may have not have been exposed to many HR responsibilities, such as operations, performance and rewards, etc., but can certainly handle a specific recruiting activity from start to finish, with strong expertise of the recruitment stages.
3. Accountable management and leadership
For many, this can be showcased as part of their main responsibilities, however whether or not it is part of your responsibilities, it’s important to view things from a leadership perspective as well.
Have you led projects or teams? How many? What were their roles? These questions could help bring out the magnitude of responsibility you’ve had in leading, coaching and developing teams, and thus portray your ability to do so in future roles.
4. Quantifiable achievements
In previous formats, we’ve explored ways of showing your responsibilities in previous roles. Here, we’ll be moving away from your contributions to highlighting their outcome. Because after all what’s the use of a business investment without a good ROI? This format focuses on showing the results of your contributions, quantitatively.
Generally, there are three ways to list such results: increasing, reducing or improving (in more general forms). The impacted metrics can include anything from money (revenue cost, profit, etc.), time, volume (customers, products, transactions, etc.) or other organizational-specific KPIs. A result or impact can be represented in a numerical value or percentage; this will depend on how relevant it is to your metric and how effective you believe it would be in showcasing your impact.
Example: You are a marketer and have led a campaign that resulted in increasing your company’s social media account’s followers by 50K; this is a large number, and is certainly nice to achieve; but what was the base? Let’s say your company’s followers on this social media account is already 50K, and an increase of 50K grew the number of followers to 100K, doubled it; wouldn’t it be nicer to mention that you’ve increased it by a 100% or even doubled it? It’s important to know the power of numbers and understand how they can be used most effectively to your advantage.
5. Trust, value and progression
You might’ve had some remarkable situations in your past experiences, where your employer, client or even educational institution has exceptionally valued or trusted you, and even given you the opportunity to play a bigger role beyond your normal one, where you have more reach to contribute to the well-being of the organization and make a larger impact.
Such accomplishments can largely vary and here I will list a generic sample of what you can include to highlight how appreciated you’ve been in previous experiences:
Fast progression or promotion
Awards or honors
Appointment in important management committees
Special employment tracks
There are five ways, but you should consider them all
Now that you’ve explored the five ways to write your accomplishments, it is import that you begin your accomplishment statements with past-tense verbs, and always prioritize them based on your career path and resume objectives. I recommend not sticking to only one way without considering the other ways to writing you accomplishments. You will always benefit from mixing and matching between them and then filtering out what works best.
I hope you’ve found this insightful for bringing out your efforts and accomplishments. Should you require further help, please feel free to make an appointment so that I can further help you, based on your individual needs, or learn more about how I help professionals (and potentially you) reach their utmost potential. Read Writing an effective résumé: Here’s what you should know! for information on how to create your resume.
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