Welcome, everyone.
It's Andy LaCivita, founder of milewalk and the award winning author of The Hiring Prophecies
and Interview Intervention coming at you with this week's webisode of Tips for Work and
Life.
We're going to talk about the best way to get promoted quickly, and this is not just
for anybody who's looking for a promotion, but anybody who wants to get ahead in their
career, whether inside their organization or outside their organization.
One of the things we're not going to talk about are all the basics that I know you already
understand.
I'm not going to tell you to have a great attitude, work hard, work smart, behave yourself,
or show up for work on time.
You know all that already.
I want to give you some more advanced techniques that are going to do three things for you.
Number one, it's going to give you some great perspective about what you've accomplished,
how far along you've come in your career, how you've helped your teammates, how you've
helped your companies, how you've helped the rest of the world and impacted them positively
by what you've done in your job and in your career.
Second thing it's going to do, it's going to be a great basis point and a lot of data
for you to have great effective discussions when you're going in for your performance
reviews, your annual reviews, your promotion discussions, or whatever it might be.
It's really, really going to be vital to have this.
The third thing it's going to do is it's going to help you most effectively populate your
resume to get ahead outside if you want to take your services to another employer.
One of the things I notice, I have a resume course and a workshop.
I do a lot of work with individuals on their resumes.
Nearly a hundred percent of them have difficulty recollecting what they've done down to the
right level of information so that they can really put some power into that resume.
So, this is really going to help you capture the benefits of what you've done.
Now, here's what I want you to do.
You can call this whatever you want.
You can call it an employee journal, an employee diary, but I want you to capture 14 pieces
of information for every major project that you do.
So, if the project lasts a day, great.
A week, great.
A month, a year, however long it is that you're focusing on what you consider a discrete project.
You could have multiple ones going on at the same time, or you can do them serially.
But for every major project in your job, in your career, I want you to capture 14 pieces
of information so that you can use them in those three manners that I talked about.
So, you can write it down, you can type it out, you can put it in Evernote, you can keep
it in a journal.
It really doesn't matter.
Just make sure you have this information.
Number 1, each project.
What was the project?
Just a high level sentence or two about what that initiative was.
Whatever the project was, whatever it was that you did, just capture what it was.
Second thing, any statistics that you can capture about the project or about what it
is that you're doing: team size, budget size, whatever the impact, how many customers were
you serving, how many employees were involved, anything that quantifies your environment.
It's really, really important that you capture that for order of magnitude.
How much did you sell?
How much did you service?
All those goodies.
Third third, what was the problem you were trying to solve?
What was the problem you were addressing?
Just at a very, very high level, what was the business issue that you were facing?
Who were you facing it with?
That's number 4, the players involved.
That could be your team members and their names, it could be the units within your company,
it could be outside vendors that you're partnering with, it's the customers that you're serving,
maybe you're serving companies or maybe you're serving individuals.
Whatever it might be to the appropriate level, capture who's involved.
It's really, really important to understand that for the order of magnitude from how many
people you might be servicing to how many people you're interacting with.
Number 5, how did you solve it?
At a high level, what is it that you were doing in order to solve that problem?
Number 6, what was the ultimate result and outcome of that entire initiative?
Was it positive?
Was it negative?
What did you learn about it?
What was the result?
Number 7, what were the benefits?
What were you actually contributing?
Now, when I talk about benefits, without going into all the different ways that I think benefits
are great to capture and how to capture them, previously, not too long ago, I shot a video
titled Eight Great Tips to Prove Your Value on Your Resume.
There are eight items in that video that talk about how you can address the benefits that
you've contributed.
Did you generate revenue?
Did you increase market awareness?
Did you improve customer service?
Did you improve employee happiness, and so on?
So, there are a number of other things that you can highlight as benefits that you contributed.
Number 8, what were the challenges that you faced?
Just at a very, very high level, what were some of the problems in the environment?
What were some of the difficulties?
Just really think about what those were.
Then number 9, how did you actually overcome them?
Think about what you did in order to overcome those challenges.
For a lot of people, they don't actually address how they overcame things, they don't remember
it, they make the same mistakes in the future.
This is a vital part to making sure that you can actually learn from what it is that you're
doing and how you overcame these challenges.
Number 10, what would you have done differently?
So, if you had to redo the entire project or whatever it is, the initiative, and you
could go back to the beginning knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Keep that in mind for the next time that you do it.
Number 11, what were the very high level lessons that you learned?
Just at a very, very high level, what is it that you can take away from that that'll help
you grow?
Number 12, how did you grow specifically?
Do you have a new skill?
Are you more knowledgeable about a market segment or an industry?
Did you learn any new techniques?
Did you learn new technologies?
Whatever it is, how did you specifically grow?
Number 13, how did your company grow as a result of implementing this project?
It's very, very important to understand the impact and the overall improvement for your
organization so that you can see how what you did contributed to that.
Number 14, what were the major victories?
There can be one victory, there can be a hundred victories, there could be a lot of things
that you did for the first time, those are all victories, whether they were successful
or not.
But think deeply about how this was victorious for you.
So, if you can capture those 14 points at each project, and the beauty of this is you
don't need to do this every day.
But the important thing about it is, you need to do it for each project, you need to do
it while you're present and there so you can collect this information because these are
all the things that people forget.
As you go through your day to day grind, as you're developing your widgets, building your
software, trying to make your sales, or whatever it is, you don't take time to really think
through these things and you lose sight of what you're actually accomplishing.
These are the kind of things that you need to remind employers about when you're up for
the promotion.
These are the kind of things that you need to get on your resume so you can really advertise
how potent a resource you are.
So, I hope this helps.
I'm not going to recap it here.
You got the 14.
I've got a handy checklist that you can download and take with you.
But for each project, start filling this in.
For projects in the recent past, try to go back and get the data.
As far back as you can go, you want to start capturing whatever you can about these types
of projects.
This information is really going to help you get ahead.
So, I hope that helps.
If you're watching this anywhere other than my YouTube channel or the Tips for Work and
Life blog, hop over there.
I've got loads of free giveaways.
Sign up for the blog, stay in touch with me, let me know what you thought of the video,
and I'll see you next week.