Confidently Speak Your Achievements
23 November 2016
Tom sat opposite me and squirmed in his chair. He avoided eye contact. “Um” he said, “err” he said, before mumbling a sentence I had trouble following. All in all the answer he had given me to what should be a straightforward question of anyone in the workplace was pretty lame.
What was the question that had him so flummoxed?
“What have been your key achievements of the last 1 to 2 years?”
Tom’s reaction is pretty typical. While most people recognise they should be able to point to their achievements, most can’t. Being able to clearly, easily and succinctly identify and articulate your achievements has benefits for you in terms of advancing your career, and benefits for your workplace, as knowledge of past achievements tends to lead to more future achievements.
I see 2 key reasons people often fail when answering the achievement question:
- People don’t take the time to see their achievements as achievements
- Social norms prevent people voicing their achievements
Know Your Achievements
To be able to speak your achievements you need to know them. To know them means you need to have reflected, identified and picked them out as achievements. This requires identifying, from all the things you have done, those things you have a genuine sense of pride about, not just things others see as achievements. To have genuine pride requires realising that you went beyond ordinary, expected effort and did something that required more skill, persistence and focused effort than normal. When you pause and do this type of reflection you strengthen your own self-confidence and sense of self-efficacy. Doing this gives you knowledge that makes it more likely you will have courage to take on new challenges in the future.
Knowing what you have achieved also makes it easier to make proactive career decisions. Examining those things you have done that have so engaged you that you put in extra effort gives you knowledge about what may be engaging for you in the future. At the end of this article I give you some questions that can help with this reflection.
Appropriate Social Sharing of Achievements
Once you know your achievements you can then make appropriate choices about how you let others know about them. And here, I think, is the reason many of us struggle to articulate our achievements and sometimes don’t even put time into identifying them. We are concerned that having too great a focus on our own achievements will result in us coming across to others as overly prideful. We have all cringed in the presence of a boastful, arrogant, big head and we do not want to be that person. Somehow we have linked self-knowledge of our achievements with being conceited.
So from a career sense a paradox is set up. It is good to know your achievements in order to have career confidence and clarity, yet being too conscious of your achievements brings up a fear you might transcend social norms. We need to find a balance. That balance is knowing how to appropriately use our knowledge of our achievements. And the rules are different using our achievements in the workplace and using our achievements in a job application context.
In essence, my advice within the workplace context is to know your achievements deeply for yourself and speak them wisely and sparingly with others. Most of the time let your actions be your words and let others talk about you. Then take the opportunity to speak about your achievements when doing so will provide teaching moments for others.
In the context of a job application you still need to know them deeply, but you need to speak and write them more liberally. This is because the rules in the job application world are different to the rules in the workplace world.
Achievement and Job Selection
In the job application world the employer is expecting you to, and needs you to, confidently put forward your achievements. When you clearly articulate the value you have given in the past the employer is better able to see the value you can give them in the future. Through telling the stories of your achievement you make it easier for the employer to make the leap of understanding between the skills, knowledge and experience you have and what you will be able to do for them. Without these stories of achievement you make it harder for the employer to make that leap of understanding.
There are three key ways to use your achievements in the job application context. The first is to ensure your achievements are listed on your resume. This can either be in a section by themselves, or as dot points against the roles you list. When listing your achievements in your resume make sure you keep them as dot points and where possible make them quantifiable. For example:
- Successfully trained 320 staff to confidently use x program
- Created 20+ well designed forms to streamline workflow
- Introduced innovative approach to gathering client feedback
A second way you can use your achievements is in drafting stories you use in your written application. In a previous article [link] I spoke about writing engaging stories in your job applications – your achievements are where these stories come from.
Finally, a deep knowledge of your achievements, and the ability to tell them out loud is invaluable when it comes to the job interview. Throughout human history we have been engaged by others, and been attracted to others, through the quality of their storytelling. Knowing and being able to tell a story (or five) about things you have achieved creates the opportunity for those interviewing you to connect with you and find you memorable. In addition when you tell stories of your achievements those interviewing you are better able to remember what you say and hear the evidence you are giving them about your capabilities. Your stories of your achievements make it easier for them to select you.
To convince other people you are valuable and worth investing in and employing, you need to believe you are valuable and worth employing yourself. Do this by giving yourself the gift of knowing your achievements.
As always, I have some suggested actions I encourage you to take:
1. Start a list of your achievements. Do this over a week or so rather than trying to write them up in one block. You will find that your sub-conscious will work on it and bring things to mind if you give it time.
2. Keep adding to your achievement list. Hint: do it when you do your career maintenance.
3. Reflect on your achievements. Here are some questions:
What do your achievements tell you about your career?
What achievements did you most enjoy doing?
What unique effort did you put into particular achievements?
What did you learn doing particular achievements?
What had you done in the past that made your current achievements possible?
What sort of ongoing impact have your achievements had?
What value do others see in your achievements?
4. Update your resume and instead of listing duties under past roles list achievements.
5. Turn 4 to 6 of your achievements into stories that you can use in job applications and that you are confident telling in interviews – in fact practice saying them out loud.
6. Take some time to turn your most recent achievement(s) into a succinct sentence you can pull out and use at the appropriate time. Refine this sentence so you can say it authentically not boastfully. Then practice saying it so when I pull out my nasty little question, unlike Tom, you will look me in the eye, smile and confidently state: “Well, Katherine, what I am most proud of achieving in the last couple of years is…”