Nothing beats the facts when asked to provide input for your performance evaluation, justification for a position upgrade, or your stellar qualifications for a promotion. Since performance and experience data is hard to locate quickly, do what savvy professionals do to prepare for any career-related opportunity:
- Establish and maintain an annual file of your work goals and accomplishments.
- Retain letters, memos, and e-mails that describe your performance.
- Make notes of organizational and economic factors that made it difficult to reach your goals, whether you achieved them or not.
- Keep all your personal business correspondence that involves your performance, objectives, and justifications.
- Detail in writing descriptions of the organization, your department, the budget, and span of control.
- Locate copies of publications you author, publications that quote you or mention your performance, or speeches you’ve delivered.
- Retain information from positions and contributions made to professional and community associations and organizations.
- Indicate your performance rankings and standings nationally, regionally, or locally.
- Use the information to write a current experience and accomplishment statement annually that demonstrates the scope of your position, the problems you encountered, how you solved them, and the results.
- Integrate organizational and economic factors into your text, such as: Achieved 110% of goals despite organization filing for Chapter 11.
Build a file to get your where you want to go.
Robbie Miller Kaplan, author of "How to Say It When You Don't Know What to Say: The Right Words for Difficult Times" and "How to Say It In Your Job Search" (Prentice Hall Press). For more information, see www.wordsthatcomfort.com.
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