Documenting your past experiences
For each “qualification”, start building your “brag list”
Your brag list is something you can refer to during interviews. Also something you can use for optimizing your cover letter / resume between applications.
It’s good to have a reference bank of specific experiences in your career that you can talk clearly about when you are in an interview and face those behavioral questions.
- Go through the job descriptions you found, and look over the job duties/qualifications
- Pick out a few key ones and write down specific examples in your career where you prove competency in this area.
- What you should write about:
- Describe the problem you encountered.
- Explain your thought process in approaching the problem.
- Share the steps you took to solve it.
- Discuss the impact that your solution had.
- Reflect on what you learned from the experience.
- Explain what you would have done differently with the knowledge you have now.
Example:
- Very strong customer service orientation.
- While working at ______, there was a situation where ____ happened. The customer was feeling ______ because ______. I noticed this and decided to _____. The ultimately resulted in the customer _______. This experience taught me _______. Knowing what I know now, I would have handled _______ differently by doing _______ instead.
Ultimately, you will end up with a large resource bank of your work experiences directly tied to job qualifications. Here’s an example from a past client of mine:
