G: Get clear
If you're not clear on the experiences and capabilities you possess, it's going to be difficult for you to imagine how you can use them to advance in your profession. To land a job you love, you need to be clear on this.
To start, let's do a career and life review. This helps you assess each professional position you've held: jobs, internships and volunteer work.
The first step involves looking at your freshly updated résumé. For your most recent role, write down your answer to the following questions: What is your specific job? What are you responsible for? What do you do? Focus on the actions you perform to fulfill your responsibilities — that is, the physical steps you take to get things done. All actions should begin with a verb: develop, analyze, coach, lead. Cross out any abstractions, assumptions or jargon. Be as clear and specific as possible.
Now, review your responses to the third question. Identify and highlight the following: themes or clusters of actions that you want to ensure you use in your new job; actions that intellectually stimulated, challenged, fulfilled and motivated you. Consolidate your highlighted items on a separate sheet of paper.
Repeat this process for all your employment and volunteer roles. You'll come back to this information later.
R: Recognise your results
To leverage your existing skills, experiences and talents during the interview process, you need to be able to articulate what they are and how you've used them. Your value lies in your ability to show your potential employer that your skills have yielded great results. If you're persuasive, you can even use this data to sell yourself for a stretch job, or a role slightly more advanced than your experience.
Go back to your résumé and answer the following three questions for your current position. Jot down your responses below the actions you highlighted in the previous step. If possible, try to connect your answers back to those actions by thinking about the specific results each of them yielded.
• What quantitative outcomes results from my actions? Quantitative results can be counted, measured and expressed with numbers. Identify each quantitative outcome, and then follow up with a "so what?" question. Numbers without context are meaningless. You need to tell a story about what those numbers mean to communicate the value of the outcome you achieved.
• What were my qualitative results? Qualitative results are descriptive and conceptual. They can be categorised based on traits and characteristics. For example, maybe you managed a group of interns, and as a result of your leadership skills, one person enhanced their communication skills to be more succinct, precise and factual.
• What was my overall impact in the role? Fill in the blanks: "When I started in this position, our revenue was ________ and our customer service ratings were __________. Over the past year, those numbers have increased by roughly __ per cent as a result of my efforts doing ________ and ________." If these metrics aren't relevant to you and your position, replace them with something that is. What data can you share that demonstrates your direct impact on your company, customers or team? This doesn't have to be a number — it can be, say, a thank-you note from a client.
For each of your professional roles, answer these three questions to recognize your results. You'll return to this data in the next step.
O: Own your impact
In each of your professional positions, you made an impact. Your customers, your team, the company, the community or an individual was changed because of you and your work. To be fulfilled and engaged in your new job, it's important to identify the positive feelings associated with the results you identified in the prior step.
So, what did you feel when you identified your results? Joy? Hope? Enthusiasm? Pride? Satisfaction? Go back to the quantitative and qualitative data you noted in the previous step and note the emotion you felt next to each of your answers.
W: Where and what else?
The final step is to identify where else you can use the actions you identified in the first step (Get Clear), particularly the ones that created impact (Recognize Your Results) and generated positive emotions (Own Your Impact). This is where all the answers you have written down come together. Think about the following:
• What do you want to do more of in a new position?
• What do your actions show in terms of what you are able to offer an employer?
• How can you use your results to advocate for yourself and take on a more advanced or more engaging role?
• What kind of impact do you need to make to find purpose, joy or excitement in your work?
You are the architect of your career. Follow this process to be intentional as you conduct your job search and open doors that were previously unimaginable. The goal is not just a new job. It is a career and work that fulfils and engages you, and thereby enables you to reach your full potential.
Written by: Carson Tate
© 2021 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. Distributed by The New York Times Licensing Group
