Track everything

Have you ever read another person’s resume? I’m not talking about the “example” resumes from Googling, “Good resume examples,” I’m talking about a real person’s resume. It’s surprising how dull and not useful the majority are.

If you’re trying to hire someone, you want to know:

1. Do you have the skills for the job?
2. Will you jive with the company?

That’s pretty much it, if you boil it down. The interviewer’s sense for #2 primarily comes from the interview and #1 comes from your resume. The biggest mistake I’ve made (and the vast majority of other resumes I’ve seen) is to make generic job descriptions for each job. The interviewer wants to see results, not the job description your last boss wrote up for the LinkedIn Job Board.

My suggestion for you to not only improve your resumes, but also to see your progress is to track everything you can. Your resume and your LinkedIn profile should be updated frequently throughout your career. Even if you don’t plan on looking for a job any time soon, you save yourself in the future if something unexpected arises, and you build up a record of business impact.

Whenever you are given a huge project, try to get an idea of the value of that project to the business. Try to capture any before-and-after stats. Most projects in business have some kind of measurement attached to it. Try to figure out what is being measured and how your contribution impacted that measurement. Talk to your manager or your boss, and tell them, “I want to make sure I’m impacting the business outcome for Project XYZ. Can you give me the stats for how this is performing right now? I’d like to compare this baseline data with the data after the project is done to see where I can improve.”

Most people would be delighted that their employees are interested in looking for ways to improve and making sure their work is ultimately helping the business.

There are other ways to track things on your own, if it’s hard to get data from the top. How many tasks do you consistently complete during the week? What have you done to improve the processes on your team or in your own workflow?

Keep an eye out for anything you can track. Build your own mini case studies that you can feature on LinkedIn, your resume, or in your own personal files (if you're under a contract, you must, of course, follow those guidelines for publicly sharing details).

When you build up these metrics and case studies, you have powerful information that can help you land a better job or get a raise or get started on a new path. If there is something you can track, make the time to collect that information. Track everything!