How to include career highlights in your resume

Career highlights are an essential inclusion in your resume. These highlights are the achievements and contributions that you have made in the various positions you've held so far in your career.

Why is it so important to include these when you create a resume?

In a nutshell.....your past performance is the best indicator to an employer or recruiter of what your future performance is likely to be.

For many people however, when building a resume however, they find that writing about their career highlights and achievements is difficult to do.

Why does this happen? There are a couple of reasons:

• People often don't know what employers want to know, so they don't know what to write about
• Often people are very unassuming about their abilities - they are reluctant to "big note" themselves.
• In addition to being unassuming, some people are completely oblivious to the importance of what they have contributed - they don't look at what they have done as being significant. Their attitude often is.... "I'm just doing my job".

Writing about your career highlights

To help you to create a resume where your career highlights truly stand out, we'll look at:

• How to write about your career accomplishments
• Using S.T.A.R. or C.A.R. formulas
• Examples of achievement statements
• Where on your resume to put your career achievements

Career highlights and achievements
Which ones do you include in your resume?

If you are not sure what is relevant or important about your work in terms of your contributions and achievements, look at the table below. Listed there are some suggestions for evaluating what you have done.

Have you ever had career highlights or achievements in any of these areas?

Automated systems	Increased productivity
Conceived new products/ideas	Increased inventory turns
Designed new equipment/procedures	Increased return on investment
Developed new products	Managed operations
Developed plans	Raised efficiencies or safety
Devised methods	Reduced costs
Eliminated unnecessary procedures	Reduced number of rejects
Enhanced profitability	Reduced energy requirements
Improved morale or team work	Reduced risk
Improved corporate image/reputation	Reduced accounts receivable overdue
Improved quality of production, or service	Reduced staff turnover
Improved or developed training	Reduced capital investment costs
Increased sales or market share	Reduced operational downtime
Increased earnings	Saved time

Your career highlights
What should you write about?

When building a resume many people significantly undersell their achievements because they don't know what sort of detail they should provide about their career accomplishments.

Here area some key questions to ask yourself so that you can write convincingly about your contributions:

• What did you actually do?
• Why did you do it?
• Why was it important that you took this action, or carried out these steps?
• How did you go about it?
• What skills did you use? In particular - skills you used that are related to the job you'd like to do
• What was the result of your actions?
• Who benefited from what you did?
• Why and/or how did they benefit?
• How do you know they benefited?

Make notes as you review the various projects and tasks that you've carried out in each of your job roles.

Your career highlights - how to write about them

There are two really simple formulas you can follow that will help you to write well about your accomplishments, and with the right amount of detail.

The S.T.A.R. formula

S.T.A.R. is an acronym which stands for:

The way the formula works is that it helps you organise your information as follows:

Situation

Describe the situation, or provide some background on your achievement. Why did you do it? Why was it important? What was the problem or opportunity that you were responding to?

For example:

• Due to a change in client demand
• In response to a customer complaint
• As a result of falling market share
• An an environment of significant cost cutting
• Working to extremely tight project deadlines and budget constraints

Task

In responding to, or as a result of the above situation, what task, or tasks were you required to do, or decide to carry out?

The task/tasks you carried out would most likely involve you in carrying out certain job functions.

For example - you planned, organised, consulted, communicated, analysed, prepared a report, budget etc

Building on some of the situation described above your statement might begin to look like:

• Due to a change in client demand I analysed alternative ways of speeding up production.
• As a result of falling market share I instigated a strategy planning workshop with the sales team.
• An an environment of significant cost cutting I re-organised the workload of the team in order to achieve greater operational efficiencies.
• Working to extremely tight project deadlines and budget constraints I developed an alternative approach to completing the project.

Action

In carrying out the task/tasks above, what were some of the specific actions that you took?

In describing your action/s you elaborate on processes, methods, procedures etc that you used or adopted in order to complete the task/s.

For example:

In response to a customer complaint I investigated the company's procedure for returning products. This involved documenting each step in the returns process, and identifying both the people and company systems involved in each step. I also conducted in-depth interviews with the staff involved at each stage of the process to obtain their ideas about improvements to process and systems.

Describing your actions in detail gives your reader invaluable insight into how you operate - your attitude, and how you apply your skills, knowledge in a particular situation.

Result

This is obviously the result or outcome from the task/s you completed, and the actions you took to complete those tasks.

When writing about results it informs the reader about:

• Who benefits? How did they benefit?
• The business impact of what you've done.
• Key deliverables, measurables, KPIs, or standards that you have achieved.
• Specific contributions that you have made.

Quantify your results wherever possible.

This is one of the best ways to present results that have credibility.

How do you do this? Describe your results in terms of actual quantities, percentages, or other forms of measurement:

• Time, or time taken
• Budget
• Quality
• Quality
• Safety
• Efficiency
• Growth, or reduction
• Actual quantities involved
• Levels of satisfaction
• Increased standards, or standards maintained
• Meeting, or exceeding targets

Career highlights statements - examples

Here are two simple examples of how to write career highlights statements, using the S.T.A.R. formula.

Example 1
In response to a significant increase in customer complaints (Situation) was required to design and implement a training program (Task) for front line staff. During design phase, analysed complaints in staff focus groups, and with assistance of the staff involved developed an alternative service delivery model (Action). Subsequently trained over 200 staff in the new service delivery model, and as a result achieved a 70% reduction in customer complaints (Result).

Example 2
On my own initiative (Situation) identified an alternative supplier of key manufacturing raw materials (Task). Investigated fully the ability of the supplier to meet materiel requirements according to our manufacturing schedule, and also negotiated a supply guarantee (Action). Prepared a successful written submission to the senior management group recommending a change in supplier (Action), with a resulting annual saving to the company of $1.5 million dollars. (Result)

Career highlights - where in your resume?

Exactly where you include your achievement statements in your resume will depend on the style of resume that you've chosen.

• Reverse chronological resume - you will usually include your achievement statements as a part of your employment history. For each job you list in your history you will need to include achievement or accomplishment statements.
• Functional resume - your achievement statements will be listed on the front page of your resume, under a heading like "Relevant Career Achievements", or "Accomplishments", or some similar heading.
• Combination style resume - you can decide to either have an achievements summary on the front page (as in the functional resume style), or include the details under the relevant job in your Employment History.

More resume writing tips

Looking for other hints and tips related to writing a great resume? Try these:

• Resume writing general guidelines
• Which heading to use and where to put them
• How to write a career objective statement
• How to write a compelling career or personal profile
• How to write about your personal employment history