When you are busy with juggling your day-to-day responsibilities, you can easily forget about significant career milestones – especially if your workplace doesn’t have a structured feedback process in place.
This means that when applying for new roles and updating your CV, coming up with key examples of your successes can be a challenge.
Creating an achievements tracker means that no professional win – big or small – is forgotten.
In this blog, we will walk you through the benefits of tracking your professional successes, when you can use them, and how to create a log of your achievements.
Why Track Your Professional Successes?
Whether you’re creating a CV, writing a Cover Letter, or preparing for a job interview, having clear evidence of your impact is the key to standing out. Tracking your successes as they happen means you will have a ready-made list to select the perfect example for any question you are asked.
Most importantly: a job hunt can feel challenging for every candidate, no matter your level of seniority or experience. Having a visual representation of your accomplishments can be the perfect way to remind yourself of your value and boost your confidence.
How Tracking Your Professional Successes Impacts Your Job Hunt
Here are the key ways that tracking your professional successes will positively impact your job search.
Create a CV more Easily
When your ideal role comes up, the most time-consuming part of the application process is creating your CV.
The recency effect means that your brain can more easily recall recent events and experiences than those that happened in the past. This means you can easily forget key successes from throughout your career if you don’t document them.
By keeping a real-time record of your career achievements, creating a compelling CV that showcases your value as a candidate becomes much easier. It also ensures that every metric you include is accurate.
Enter Interviews with Confidence
An achievements tracker also ensures you are never caught off guard by a question in a job interview.
You can shape your tracker around creating a bank of examples of answering the kinds of competency and leadership-based questions that often come up when applying for senior-level positions.
Having clear, concrete examples of your successes will help identify essential talking points about your key skills, leadership style, and USPs as a candidate. As a result, you will make a brilliant impression and avoid the dreaded job interview mind blank.
Create Negotiation Power
Finally, documenting your successes can strengthen your position when asking for a payrise or promotion in your existing workplace.
If you can provide tangible examples of the differences you have made within your team and the wider organisation, you can enter any performance review with much more confidence in your value as an employee.
How to Track Your Professional Successes
Now you understand the importance of tracking your successes and the impact it can have on your job hunt, how do you get started?
Here is our simple three-step guide on how to effectively track your professional successes:
1. Create a Success Tracking Document
Firstly, set up a document you will find easy to update.
We recommend keeping things simple with a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or even the notes app on your phone.
The most important thing is that you use a document format you understand, so updating it is quick and easy.
You may even wish to set up a dedicated folder for your professional successes, so you can store relevant screenshots, photographs, or documents that provide evidence for your achievements.
2. Record Your Achievements
Next, you’ll need to spend some time recording your key professional achievements so far.
You don’t need to try and remember successes throughout the entirety of your career. We recommend trying to include key milestones from the last two or three years, so the examples you share in your CV, Cover Letter, and job interviews are as current as possible.
Try and record your successes in as much detail as possible. Include context, any challenges you faced, the action you took, and the outcome you achieved as a result.
You should also focus on quantifiable results, such as percentages around growth, cost reductions, or efficiency gains
Other professional successes you should track include:
- Presentations you have delivered at industry conferences or events;
- Leadership programmes you have participated in;
- Relevant voluntary work you have completed;
- Internal committees you have participated in;
- Articles you have written for industry publications.
3. Update Your Achievements Tracker Regularly
Finally, set regular calendar reminders to revisit your achievements tracker, removing any outdated examples and adding any new ones to transform it into a comprehensive track record of your career.
You can set this as a monthly or quarterly task to complete, but we recommend updating this document in real-time. For example, once key projects are completed, company targets are hit or exceeded, and even simply when you receive feedback within your organisation.
This way, the information is fresh and you never miss an important detail that could be the differentiator you need to secure a new position.
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When done regularly and strategically, tracking your professional successes is the secret behind a successful job hunt. The hardest part is getting started, so try and take some time today to sit down and reflect on your recent wins.
That way, when your perfect role appears, you are armed with all the examples you need to wow prospective employers through every aspect of the job application process.
And if you’re struggling to decide which of your achievements should be included on your CV, our team of expert writers would love to help.