G8 Career / Visibility Without Self Promotion

Describe What You Did By The Problem It Solved

Activity is uninteresting to almost everyone. Consequences are interesting to almost everyone.

Most accounts of work are lists of activity. I ran the workshops, I maintained the register, I attended the vendor meetings. It is accurate and it is nearly useless, because it tells the reader what occupied your hours without telling them what would have been different if you had not been there. The alternative is to lead with the problem. There was a recurring failure in handover between two teams, it was causing rework every fortnight, I redesigned the handover and the rework stopped. Same work, framed by its consequence, and now a reader who knows nothing about your area can understand why it mattered.

This framing is also the honest one, which is worth stating clearly. It is not about inflating anything. If the result was partial, say it was partial. If it was a team effort, name the team, and be precise about your part rather than blurring it into a collective we that quietly implies more. Claiming credit for work that was not yours is both wrong and, in most workplaces, discovered eventually. The discipline of describing outcomes accurately actually makes overclaiming harder, because outcomes can be checked in a way that lists of activity cannot.

Keep a record as you go, because memory does not cooperate. A running note, updated every few weeks, with the problem, what you did and what changed, takes minutes and is worth a great deal later. It is the material for any conversation about your role, and more usefully it is a mirror. Reading six months of your own entries tells you honestly whether you have been solving problems or merely absorbing activity, and that is information you want well before anyone else forms a view about it. The entries that are hardest to write, because nothing changed and you cannot say what the work was for, are the ones worth paying attention to.