Document Your Day

You should be documenting your day, your week, your month, on a regular basis. Take a few minutes when you accomplish something and make a blog entry. This is a great way for you to keep track of what you’ve accomplished during the year, and be ready to talk about it in an interview, or in a performance review.

You don’t have to publically blog this. You can use Word, emacs, Live Writer, text files, whatever works, but, keep track of it. Read through it when you need it and summarize your accomplishments for the quarter or year. This is also something you consult every quarter when you touch your resume.

And when you get ready for that review, read Kendra Little’s post on asking for a raise.

Why brand if you don't need a new job?

The last time I presented The Modern Resume, I was a bit rushed, and I had the comment from someone afterwards that all the advice I had given could be used in a performance review. That's totally true, and I had a small bullet to that effect, but due to the time constraints, I didn't emphasize it.

If you can work for the same company for 20, 30, 40 years, good for you. Not everyone can, and perhaps not even the majority of people can. However even if you do, you will have reviews periodically where someone will look to rate your performance, perhaps help you decide where to grow your career within the company, and likely decide on how much of a raise you get.

Documenting the work you do, volunteering within the company, blogging about the things you've learned, noting your accomplishments that have benefited the company, will help you negotiate and debate the validity of a raise. It's always a debate, and the more evidence you can provide that justifies your increasing value, the more likely you can convince someone you deserve a raise. This applies as well to a promotion or a change of job, which may be something you want, even within the same company.

However as you blog, document, etc., you want to be sure that you are doing this in a way that shows your value to the company, or maybe the value you can bring by moving into a new position.

Back Up Your Resume

Don’t make a second copy, though it does make sense for you to keep a second copy of your resume on a separate system. Losing that data would not be good.

However for this post, what I really mean is that you need to be able to talk about the various things you’ve posted on your resume.

 

It’s all Fair Game

If you wrote that you consolidated server instances to save the company $100,000, you should expect to be asked any of these questions:

• How did you know you saved $100k?
• How many servers were consolidated?
• What happened to the old hardware?
• How did you decide which servers to consolidate?
• Did performance suffer? How do you know?

Open ended questions, and not necessarily easy to answer on the spur of the moment if you don’t have stories prepped.

Anything you have on your resume is fair game, so take a few minutes before any interview to review your resume and be ready to talk about anything on it.

 

Build Detailed Stories

At each job, you should have something you are proud of and can tell a story about. These are the chances that you have to build a bond, show some depth to yourself, your career, and your skills.

I