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welcome to career growth Made easy with Craig. And so I'm your host. Welcome back for Episode two Previously, I had shared my unexpected job loss after nearly 12 years of dedicated service. You know, my stomach still twists and turns even though those days are long gone. I just keep visualizing that day that it happened. I overcame and succeeded. However, it wasn't an easy journey. I've been there and done that, as they say. But please know if you're there now I fully recognize and I support you. It doesn't matter if you're hearing this in the U. S or abroad. I know what it feels like. And even if you're new to the job force, I can understand the potential fear, anxiety or questioning attitude and thoughts popping in your head such as Am I good enough who will hire me? From my point of view, I would say this is normal. At least it was for me. And if you disagree with me, that's okay. I'm just sharing from my personal experience, you know, thinking back while desperately looking for a job. I really looked forward to the next paycheck, whatever that might be. And wherever that might come from just a chance to feel like I contributed back to the family again. My loving wife, Erin, was doing more than just her share of the household chores, holding the fort down, shuttling the kids back and forth home. Making that part cannot be overstated. I'm going to explain that our family set up, so I'm going to get a little personal with you. After my wife and I both graduated college, we discuss plans for a future family and recognized that as an engineer I was likely to earn a greater income, and thus she would stay home with our kids, God willing, if we were blessed to have them. So she continued to care for the kids while I put my nose to the grindstone and focused on full time job recovery. Hey, speaking of job recovery, that reminds me that back in Episode one I promised some resume advice, and I think I mentioned a freebie. We'll stay tuned to the end because I'm gonna make good on both promises. Back to my story. While there were some pauses in our household income stream, we couldn't have gotten through it alone. We had to swallow our pride, and we learned over time to depend on others love, prayers and generosity to get through that unemployment. To this day, we still ask for in exchange loving thoughts, wishes and, most importantly, prayers for one another, especially those that are going through hard times. We appreciated any and all financial support friends and family were able to give. I'll share with you one specific time that caught me by surprise. I've actually tearing up about it, just thinking about it. As I relive the situation in my head during my unemployment break, I felt our family had exhausted every effort looking for jobs, whether part time or seasonal, and in my degree, field or otherwise. Day shift or night shift wasn't even a concern anymore. I remember my awesome now late father, Jean made every effort to assist us financially with house chores, family transport and frequently showing up with a family meal. I know he's had in heaven now, and I can't even begin to explain the type of man he was, where the efforts he put forth on a daily basis, I can only attempt to live up to half the man an example that he was to our family, so moving forward but still in my unemployment break, My family and I were becoming desperate at an all time low, not knowing if we'd have enough money to pay our mortgage or family health insurance. Our two biggest bills at the time. The thought of losing shelter was one thing literally looming over our heads, but with having kids and going through unexpected illnesses and untold medical bills that would sink us for sure if we could get up the money. Somehow we'd pay the health insurance because once it lapsed, it lapsed and there was no recovery. At least that's how I understood it. One weekend after attending Sunday Mass and serving as a cat, a kiss teacher for either seventh or eighth grade, I was approached by a church member and given a small, plain white envelope with Craig written on it, That's it. No return address, no hints to who was from, and no idea of what was inside. I guess I expected it to be a wishing well note or prayer card. I think my heart literally stopped for a moment when I opened it and saw what was inside. It was exactly the amount of money needed to cover one full month of our mortgage or family health insurance. Words just cannot express the feeling of over joy, love, renewed faith, amazing generosity and curiosity that overwhelmed me at the time I regained my wits and I drove home to share the beautiful blessing with Aaron and the kids, opening the envelope and showing them the money. I remember crying with joy. Needless to say, we were very fortunate. Not everyone has family, friends or a church network like we did and still do. We do our best every day to pay that forward through what we call in our church. The three teas. They stand for time, talent and treasure, switching back to that fateful day and my resume. It was outdated for sure. It took a lot of time and a lot of effort, and when I was done, it was a compilation of stuff. No matter how hard I tried, I just didn't have a message. After that job loss, it was so difficult to pull accurate details and dates together, it felt good sure to get the info out of my head and onto paper, but it wasn't well organized and it didn't tell a story. The trick waas that I should make sure all the info just didn't end up on the resume. Let me explain. A resume introduces you to a specific job opening or job availability. If you're showcasing your working level skills, you can highlight the tasks or the actions that you've performed at various jobs, maybe even choose a core skills or key competency section and place it at the top. However, if you've built up some experience and now we're looking to promote into or apply to a management or leadership position than describing the task based accomplishments just won't do because they won't highlight you properly when coaching, I frequently suggest using the with him approach that's spelled W I I f M. And it stands for what's in it for me. So from a potential future employers viewpoint, they want to envision you as a good fit for their opening. If you list tasked based activities, it portrays you as a working level team member. Instead of describing management or leadership characteristics such as having and seeing bigger visions, those aspiring to promote many times seek growth opportunities both personally and professionally, outside their existing rolls. In my case, I started as an engineer at the working level and during several promotions into leadership. Of course, over time, and my resume needed to highlight that very clearly and very cleanly talking about clean and clear language. Another tool that is frequently used for actions and gold setting also is great for resumes, and the acronym is smart. You may have heard of it. We use the smart approach to define details by describing accomplishments that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time based. This technique helps you provide the details and specifics when listing key accomplishments. Here's a couple of examples in case you're not familiar with it. When brainstorming resume content from your work history and experiences you might have written, I saved our company money by reducing customer refunds or helped encourage sales of our products and service. Is these air very simple examples to illustrate a point. They're vague. They don't convey a strong, clear message of your accomplishments, which is the goal here. I would suggest to use smart messaging. So how do you do that? I'm glad you asked. I saved our company money by reducing customer refunds. Could turn into saved $12,000 last year by converting 24 customer refund requests and helped encourage sales of our product or service could turn into sold 17 units of product service, resulting in $34,000 of revenue. You probably want to add the date and time in there on our first example. You may be able to punch us up a little bit more, but on Lee, if the facts support it. If there was a specific time period last year than most of the refund conversions happened, then you could say something like saved $9000 in fiscal year 18 quarter three, or saved $9000 in the fall of 2018 with 18 refund conversions. The data collection part is typically a lot easier if you're still employed and have access to your records. Speaking of records going forward, if you don't do this already, I recommend some type of documentation system, whether it's computer file folders, email archives, note pads, whatever you trust for storage and are familiar with because you want to use this technique frequently. Any time you receive a note of appreciation for unique task or, if you are recognized for some type of accomplishment, regardless of how it was communicated verbally in person by phone email, old fashioned letter. Whatever the matter, this should be documented accurately. Why do you ask? Having this info at hand is extremely valuable for updating your resume and also comes in very handy at review time. I've been consistently tracking accomplishments and recognition for over 20 years. I use the My Documents folder on my PC, and it's titled Performance Reviews. Each year has a sub folder, which could then be calendar based or fiscal year based. It really depends on how your company handles their performance reviews annually, but you want to make sure you're in sync with that. If you like this idea, feel free to start using it right away. If you're just starting out, you can check your email history, work logs, paper and computer calendars for special activities or projects that you're involved with. Perhaps your company has some type of recognition program. Maybe you've received an award for an improvement idea, which led to cost savings, reduced work effort, increased efficiency or you corrected a safety hazard. All these things count, since they characterized the type of person that you are. It may sound funny collecting and documenting pats on the back like an email saying, Craig, Great job on closing out Project X or Great job for completing activity y ahead of schedule. But it's well worth it. When summarizing your annual accomplishments, you can also use Smart to really shine as a last example. You can quantify, which is really a fancy word for Count. You can quantify or count the pats on your back and then organize them based on who or what departments they came from. Here's an example. In 2018 my productivity was recognized by three supervisors to managers and seven and customers. Or in spring 2019 I successfully expanded the customer service department to support loading, dock, warehouse and inventory departments. These were just some off the top of my head. I'd probably want more smart details in those and to choose the wording more carefully. If you're not used to thinking or writing this way, it should at least give you a good start. So now, to wrap things up, let's see what we've covered. Structuring your resume content using the with him approach the difference between a resume targeted at a working level. Position versus a leadership position. Using smart structure to create clean and clear resume content. Finally tracking and using historical accomplishments and recognition to boost resumes and performance reviews. Oh yeah, for your free download of our resume tune up tips. See the link in the show notes. This freebie walks you through today's most common resume for batting mistakes and how to fix them. You can also visit craig Ansel dot com forward slash 002 for this episode, the show notes and the Link for a free resume Tune up Tips. If you found this info useful, please subscribe and share our podcast, especially to those that might be struggling with career growth or if they happen to be unemployed and just need a boost. Our weekly podcasts are intended to jump start your week with some tips or techniques you can immediately implement towards your high performance growth journey. If you have a specific problem or challenge, you're trying to overcome it work or questions on how to boost your career performance. Please drop us a note info at Craig and sell dot com. We'll do our best to work out a response and drop it into a future episode as a final reminder. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast because we've got some great freebies coming up, just like our free resume tune up tips we'd hate for you to miss out. This is Craig and sell, reminding you we turn problems into potential and issues, and the opportunities will see you next week.
