3 Simple Changes To Become A Standout Job Applicant

2) Strategically Expand Activities and Track Accomplishments to Land Your Dream Job

Do you remember learning to ride a bike?

It’s an awkward feeling at first. You have to stay balanced, peddle, and keep your eyes on the road…all while trying not to fall flat on your face.

Eventually, with practice and perseverance, the initial awkwardness of riding a bike goes away. Without focusing on each step, proficient bike riders can use their bikes to get places, get exercise, or simply have fun.

Just like learning to ride a bike, we learn new skills throughout our lives. We start with the basics and then move to mastery through practice. Advancing in a career is no different—we have to take baby steps before moving up in the ranks or leading others. Once we have a solid track record of success, we can start career advancement with ease.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to (strategically) move up the career ladder…without pedaling too fast and falling on your face:

Take On New Responsibilities Without Jeopardizing Your Performance

Once you’ve become a master of your current role, start looking for new opportunities to prove yourself in the workplace. Remember: find opportunities that genuinely help others so that you don’t come off as the “teacher’s pet.”

The tricky thing is, you were hired for a specific job. Taking initiative is a delicate dance of continuing your old work while adding on new work…without jeopardizing your current position.

Here’s how you can add responsibility, without putting your job at risk:

• List list baby. Create a list of potential opportunities and brainstorm how it will benefit your team and organization.

• Research it up. If you’re looking to find new opportunities at work, you need to know what others have done before you. Find out what projects (successful and not) have been done in the past to guide you in the future. Propose new initiatives that align with successful projects in the past to avoid reinventing the wheel.

• Do you have time for that? Figure out what days you would work on these tasks and how much time each task would take (approximately).

• Sharing (your plans) is caring. Make a plan to share the results of your efforts with your boss formally. Sharing can take many forms: a write-up, a brief conversation, or an email might be a good place to start.

By making a plan to add responsibilities to your plate strategically, you can gain the trust of your boss and coworkers at the same time. Eventually, your team will allow you to work more independently because you have proven yourself trustworthy, responsible, and results-oriented.

When you keep your boss in the loop about your additional initiatives, you maintain open dialogue and safeguard your current position.

Get Buy-in From Managers and Coworkers

Here’s the thing: no one likes a “know-it-all” or a new employee who comes in, wanting to change everything on day #1.

It might seem simple, but the best way to get buy-in from other people is to listen and talk to others. Working with others will ensure that you are liked and helpful at the same time.

Here are some practical ways to get buy-in from others:

• Speak to your manager directly! Although it might be intimidating, speaking directly to your manager is helpful in numerous ways. You can gauge interest in potential projects, check-in, or keep an ear out for new ways to help out. Your manager will appreciate your open communication and may be more likely to give you significant responsibilities in the future.

• Don’t be a know-it-all. Coworkers who have been at your company longer than you are valuable information sources. Take the time to get to know your team. By valuing other people’s opinions, they will be more likely to buy-in to your ideas.

Getting buy-in from your boss and coworkers secures your place as a member of the team while allowing you to seek out new opportunities. Open communication lines will cement your position as a vital team member in the future.

Prove Your Value by Tracking Metrics That Matter

Once you formulate a plan and get buy-in from others at work, it’s time to track metrics that measure your effectiveness.

While tracking metrics may seem daunting in the short-term, your future self will thank you. Why? Hard data and metrics are one of the best ways to demonstrate your value to a potential employer.

For example, metrics help you transform how you talk about yourself:

• Instead of saying… “I helped people a lot.”

• You’ll say… “I effectively resolved customer requests 98% of the time with over 2,000 customers per year.”

While you can track any metric that seems the most valuable to you or your future goals, here are 3 metric-tracking ideas to get you started:

• Resolution rate. The example above about helping people is an example of a resolution rate metric. Resolution rate = out of all the customer support requests received, how many did you resolve?

Your resolution rate demonstrates your overall effectiveness in customer service in concrete terms.

• Average time to resolve requests. This metric is relatively self-explanatory. You will most likely want to track how long it took you to resolve each issue on average.

Your average time to resolution demonstrates how quickly you resolve customer issues: the faster, the better. However, there is a catch. Make sure you are resolving customer issues in a quality manner, not merely rushing through them.

If you find that tracking average resolution time negatively impacts your service quality, it might not be the best metric for you.

• The number of interactions per service request. This metric demonstrates how many interactions it takes until a customer issue is solved.

This metric reveals the quality of your responses. Fewer interactions = less time spent solving each customer’s issues. When interactions are solved quickly, it most likely means that your help is exhaustive and effective the first time without much back-and-forth.