How to integrate Accomplishment Statements into your Personal Branding

In my previous post, we saw how to develop accomplishment statements into 30 word or less RA (quantified Result & Action) statements. Now that you have them, how do you put them to use? These are the foundation for building your personal brand. The RA statements are what you use to articulate your value in all your marketing collateral. They are the bullet points in your resume that demonstrate your success in leveraging your skills. They are your punch or impact of your 30 second commercial. Putting them onto index cards and memorizing them to complete ownership allow you to answer interview questions succinctly without rambling, letting the interviewer what you will bring to the table.

How many accomplishment statements should you have? As I said in earlier posts, in order to for a company to justify paying you a salary, every task or project you have worked on throughout your career should contribute to the generation of revenue, reduction of costs or mitigation of risks. You should be able to come up with at least 2 to 3 accomplishment statements per year of your career. By developing these statements, you will demonstrate what value you have given to previous employers and leverage these to indicate what value you will bring to future employers. As stated by John Hall so well, “If you want more salary, demonstrate more value!”

How to use Accomplishments to build your Brand Foundation

The first step in recognizing your personal brand identity is to understand what sets you apart from every other person competing with you for jobs. First, we are all created different. As I mentioned in the introduction we each have a unique set of skills, passions and experiences. We need to do a self-assessment to determine what those are. What are your motivating skills that really energize you when you are at work? Next, assess what your accomplishments have been throughout your career. In looking at your career, don’t think in terms of “I just did this process” or “I just did this task”. Every employee, in order to earn his or her salary needs to do one the following:

Think in terms of “In doing this task, I contributed this to the company. For example, rather than saying “I perform financial audits”, think about why the company needs you to prepare financial reports. In other words, the statement in a generic sense might change to “I reduce company costs and help the company operate more efficiently by performing financial audits”. The best indicator of success in a prospective position is past success. So, to take it a step further you need to develop specific accomplishment statements for what you have achieved throughout your career. These are often referred to as power stories or PARs (Problem, Action, Result) or STARs (Situation/Task, Action, Result), and can be generated by following:

Congratulations! You have your first PAR, or Power Story. Now repeat this process to create a bank of power stories that can be used throughout your job search as well as your career management. In my upcoming blog, I will talk about how these PARs and how you did them become the foundation for your branding.