Do This To Make Future You a Rock Star
What if I told you there's one simple thing you can do right now to make your future self stand out when you’re ready to make a job change?
It’s capturing your career stories.
Career stories are your anecdotes about how you tackle challenges, show your skills in action, and demonstrate that you’re a rockstar in the workplace.
Interviewers still rely on behavioral questions like "Tell me about a time when..." or "How would you go about..."
The candidate that stands out is the one who can show, not tell.
Picture this: instead of stumbling over a hypothetical, generic response about how you deal with change, you confidently share an example of how you dealt with a last-minute requirement change two days before your project went live.
Your stories paint a vivid picture of your capabilities. That's the power of storytelling.
There are a few different approaches you can use but they all follow the basic premise of storytelling:
STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result
SOAR: Situation, Obstacles, Action, Result
CAR: Challenge, Action, Result
When I was knee-deep in my own job search, I created a document detailing my career stories. I kept adding to it with each year that went by – at one point it was 29 pages.
Yep, I’m an unabashed nerd, but it paid off big time. I felt prepared and confident – and my interviewers could sense that.
You don't have to go to that extreme.
Here's what you can do: carve out a bit of time, ideally twice a year, to jot down a few key stories. Put it on the calendar, get yourself a drink of choice, turn up your favorite playlist, and recap the past few months of work.
Here are some categories to get you going:
Accomplishments and challenges
Problem solving and decision making
Flexibility and dealing with change
Communication and influence
Teamwork successes and challenges
Leadership and managing others
Client and/or stakeholder management
Initiative / process improvement / innovation
Let's set you up for success, one story at a time. Trust me, your future self will thank you.