Learning Ideas

One of my dad’s favorite expressions was: “Age and Experience.” He would often say this to imply that as I got older, I would have more life experience and better understand the situations I found myself in. I quickly came up with the corollary that it was possible to gain the age without gaining the experience. I have recently discovered one such area in which my past experiences did not prepare me for the current situation.

Over the past couple of years, I have had opportunities to describe my past accomplishments – both for an internal promotional opportunity and more recently in a job search situation. I have learned that a great tool for this is a collection of brief “stories” that describe the situation or task at hand, the activities involved in resolving the situation or performing the task, and the results of those activities. These brief 3-5 line stories have different acronyms describing them, but the one I like best is STARs (as defined in my explanation).

I have spent the majority of my career in customer and sales support roles, and most of those years were before there were such metrics as those required for Service Level Agreements (SLAs). I usually referred to my “scheduling” as “interrupt-driven,” meaning I would receive a call (an interrupt), rush out and get the job done, then wait for the next call. Once I moved from a technical worker to management, it took a bit of effort to think in terms of projects and results.

I have found myself in a situation where I need to recall all those Situations and Tasks, and the Activities performed to resolve those situations and accomplish those tasks. I can do that pretty well, but I fall short in knowing the Results in terms of dollars and percentages. The reason for this is simple. I never thought in those terms for many years and I simply do not have the data.

Lessons Learned: So here is what I suggest for those of you at any stage of your career. Keep track of all those situations in which you performed well. Start a file of your “STARs,” and be sure you record the results of your actions. If you don’t know what they are, make the point to find out. That too will look good on your record.