Your Accomplishments Library
. . . Defining Who You Are
as an Executive or Manager.

Assessing Your Skills . . . Building an "Accomplishments Library"

If a prospective employer asked you to recite your major accomplishments in a work or organizational environment, you could probably come up with three or four stories to tell without much trouble. Unless you have prepared appropriately, these may be the only “accomplishments” that pop into your mind . . . and they may not be the case histories that are most pertinent to the situation at hand.

Your Accomplishments begin to answer the primary question in any prospective employer’s mind, “can this person handle the job?” What we have found in working with executives over the years is that they typically have a vast reservoir of success stories to tell. But, they take most of them for granted and overlook the opportunities to use them to “sell” their talents.

Tell Me Why I Should Hire You?

So, before you build your Executive Resume or Resume Cover Letters, you need to thoroughly explore the bottom-line benefits of your prior experience. And, until you have at least 50 or 100 separate items in your Accomplishments Library, you’re not ready for the big game. Building your Accomplishments Library will also provide you with solid guidance in identifying your Key Talents, your Core Competencies and appropriate Qualification Statements . . . the building blocks of not only your Executive Resumes, but your Professional Sound Bites as well.

Accomplishments are the Foundation of Your Entire Job Search Program.

From Your Resumes to your 30-Second Commercial, Accomplishments Serve As The Foundation For Every Step In Your Professional Job Search Process.

The challenge is twofold. First, our limited memory span is coupled with the fact that we tend to take a lot of the things we do for granted. But, it’s precisely those everyday successes on the job (that we may have been getting paid for) that a prospective employer or investor wants to know about in order to have confidence in us going forward.

And second, unless you are clairvoyant, it’s not always possible to recite the correct story, in the right way off the cuff. Knowing what an interviewer or business contact is most interested in allows you to pull up a selection of stories that fit the situation . . . but, only if you’ve done your homework beforehand.

You Probably Have No Idea How Many Accomplishments You Have Over The Years

If you follow the discipline outlined in our Executive Job Search System for building your own Accomplishments Library, you are likely to find that those “half dozen or so” stories you can recall easily will soon turn into several dozens or a hundred or more. And, properly formatted, they become powerful weapons in your personal arsenal that will serve you well whether you are conducting a job search or looking for investors for a new venture.

The more complete your Accomplishments Library (think 100-200 or more!), the more powerful your Executive Job Search program becomes. Just in case you need a handy reference on how important this is to you and the impact it will have on your success, here are ten key reasons to be absolutely relentless in building the foundation of your program.

Ten Important Reasons to Build a Complete Accomplishments Library:

Discover Key Talents you may have taken for granted. People who are task oriented tend to focus on solving the problems at hand and moving on to the new challenges.
Build your self-confidence in conducting your Executive Job Search. We have found that a person’s self esteem grows in direct proportion to the number of case histories documented in the Accomplishments Library.
Identify your areas of Core Competence to help you define your value proposition. As you build the library, patterns will emerge that will make it clear what you are best at.
Hone your Qualification Statement/s for Resume headlines. When you base your Qualification Statement for a particular position on the solid ground of your Accomplishments, the words become energized and powerful.
Provide a matrix of success stories to highlight Resumes and Cover Letters. The stories give life to your career and provide people with ways to “sell you” with conviction.
Quantify the impact in dollars and time saved resulting from your management decisions. Good decisions have positive outcomes that have measurable results. Even if they were never fully documented, you can estimate the magnitude or “value” of the outcome.
Provide reasons for people to grant you Interviews, whether or not they have job openings. Good executives worry constantly about what they don’t know. Your experience can be invaluable to them even if they haven’t experienced a similar problem . . . at least, not yet.
Give yourself ammunition for turning Interviews into job offers. While we stress that “Informational Interviews” should not be confused with Job interviews, the success stories you tell can often lead to job interview with the same or new companies.
Inspire you to write Articles and White Papers for publication. Here is where you can get the printed word to work for you while you are sleeping. It just may be that your experience can be turned into highly desirable editorial material . . . which can lead to interviews, etc.
Provide content for email follow-ups to Interviews and Network connections. The more pertinent success stories you have to tell, the longer “tail” you will have on your contacts and communications.

And, something to consider: Calling on your Accomplishments Library to answer the question, “why should I hire you?” can not only put you closer to the job offer, it gives you ammunition for negotiating an appropriate level of compensation.

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SBI!