Results Resumes

Many of the questions I get from job seekers are about resumes.  They typically ask questions like, “Should I put my education at the top or the bottom?”  or “Should I have an objective?”  or “I’m over 50, if I list all my dates of employment, will the employer think I’m  too old for the job?” .

All of these are valid questions in the job seekers mind, but the question they really want answered is, “What is going to make me stand out and get my foot in the door?” and trust me, it isn’t whether or not you have an objective listed.

What makes you stand is listing results instead of just job tasks or skills.  For example, if you are in sales, don’t just list that at your current job you “make sales calls”.  What did those sales calls lead to?  Hopefully, a certain increase in customers and thus revenue that you can quantify is what it led to.  Why would you not put this on your resume?  If you are an administrative assistant, tell them that the filing system you implemented led to a reduction in lost orders (and by how many) not just that you have experience filing.  That employer can probably find thousands of people tomorrow that have done filing.

And if they are team results, then all the better.  Tell them about the team results in a way that shows you can 1) Work with a team and 2) Achieve results through and with others.   There is not a job today that doesn’t involve some type of teamwork.

I will admit, it is hard to shift thinking from tasks to results when it comes to work.  The majority of resumes are task based (as are the majority of ways we define jobs). But this is all the more reason to think and put results on your resume.  It is a way to distinguish you from other job applicants, and that is what is going to get your foot in the door for an interview.

Getting Caught up in Competencies

A client I’m working with to implement a performance management and development program for his production team leaders has been having trouble with the word “competency”.  It’s a big word with little meaning to most people, so why do I keep saying it?

I talked a few weeks ago about job modeling the “superstar” in order to develop performance standards for this client.   Basically, I’ve been calling the areas we have identified as critical to performance as “competencies”.

I have tried to stress that what I mean, at least, by “competency” instead of “task” or “job duty” is that a competency is not just simply what the worker does, but what defines excellent performance.  (More information on the distinction between competency modeling and job analysis as well as how to successfully develop competencies can be found in the article, Doing Competencies Well: Best Practices in Competency Modeling).   Competencies should be driven from organizational strategy and be linked to behaviors that distinguish average from excellent performance.

After all, I didn’t observe the worst performer or even the average performer to develop the model for this client.  I observed the one(s) that got results.  Many would say it should be more complicated that than that, and maybe if I described all the steps to develop a valid model, you may think it is.  But it’s not.  The bottom line is what contributes to your business bottom line is what you use.   Maybe I should start calling it a “bottom-line model” instead of a “competency model”.    Do you think this would make more sense to us all?

A Wise Investment

Last week, the Morgan County Business Leaders’ Summit on Early Childhood Education was hosted by the Decatur-Morgan County Chamber of Commerce.  The purpose of the summit was to focus on making young children a top economic priority.

One might begin to wonder, how on earth is Pre-K tied to business or economic success?  The workforce development panel argued there are two reasons:

1.       It matters to the current workforce.  In Alabama, 63% of children from birth to age 5 have both their parents in the workforce.  So access to childcare (and one would hope quality, learning based childcare) is a necessary support for working families. 

In addition, 90% of women and 80% of men reported that childcare was important to them in terms of changes or improvements in jobs or employment according to a 2009 Ask Alabama Poll.  Working parents can be more productive at work if their childcare needs are met.

2.       It matters if we want to have a future workforce.   A staggering 38 out of 100 of students don’t graduate from high school in Alabama.  It is even higher in some areas of the state.   In a  working world that increasingly requires at least a high school diploma to be hired,  we’re losing more than a third of the potential worker pool due to lack of education.

High quality Pre-K has been proven to close the educational achievement gap.   Over one-half of the gap in school achievement is present at school entry, and if a child is not reading on grade level in 1^st grade, there is a 90% chance he/she will not be reading on grade level in 4^th grade.  Pre-K can help eliminate these gaps, especially for children living in poverty.

                If someone told you that they had an investment for you that guaranteed a 16% rate of return would you invest?  We’d all be stupid not to.  In comparison, the stock market’s annual real rate of return from 1871-2010 was 6.72%.   Well, a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis determined that annual real rates of return on public investments in the Perry Preschool Project (high quality preschool) were 16%.   My question is, as businesses, governments, and individuals why aren’t we all investing?

               

                Many individuals and companies see the connection and have a dream of investing.  But like Jim Fincher, Site Manager at 3M Decatur said, we need the dream, but we also need the plan to make it happen.  We need a mechanism for interested parties to invest.  If you are interested in creating such a plan for Morgan County, email Jim Page at jim@dcc.org to join the Education Task Force at the Chamber.

Retirees as Trainers

Part of the work I do in economic development involves interviewing manufacturing plant managers to see how their business is going and to gain insight from them on what the community can do to help them maximize their success.

One area of business that we ask about is workforce training and development.  In speaking with Jim Fincher, Site Manager at 3M Decatur, he said that one of the things that he is excited about is their implementation of retired 3Mers becoming their go-to trainers.    With the influx of new production operators and industrial maintenance staff, Jim said many of which didn’t grow up fixing things (they played video games instead) like the retiring generation did, these baby-boomer retirees are helping teach the new workforce the skills they need to be successful in a production environment where troubleshooting, problem solving and fixing things is a part of the job. 

It’s also a win for the retirees, Jim said, because they get to earn a little extra money.  More importantly, however, the retirees enjoy having the opportunity to teach and share with others not only the skills they possess, but also the wisdom that they have accrued over time.  

Today there is so much talk about succession planning in business.  How are we going to make sure we have the bench staff to replace the baby boomer workforce is a concern I hear frequently.  But why can’t we think outside of the box like Jim at 3M has done?   We don’t have to lose the talent and wisdom of individuals just because they reach their 60s. It doesn’t have to be a stay on full-time or retire choice. People don’t just reach retirement age and become useless to the workplace.  We can offer flexible arrangements to give those at or after retirement age the opportunity to come off the full-time payroll while maintaining what we need from them the most- their experience and expertise.

The Manufacturing Institute’s Skills Gap Report  points to other ways to close the skills gap.  You can find these in the blue box on page 11.

What have you done to think outside the box to meet your training needs?  What ROI have you seen as a result?

Constant Connectedness

Today, we are constantly connected.   With the ease in which we can send and receive information, I wonder if we have fostered a culture of ADD, never fully concentrating on anything and therefore, never really doing anything well.

So what problem does this cause?  First of all, it severely limits productivity.  Secondly, it causes us to never fully engage in the task, or the meeting or must importantly, the person right in front of us.  Ever sat in a meeting and had no idea what was said because you were constantly checking your email on your blackberry?  When did this come back to bite you at work?  Ever had a co-worker come to talk to you about a work-related issue and you constantly kept looking at your computer at emails or your facebook page? How did this hurt your relationship with that co-worker or actually hurt your work outcomes?

What do we do about this constant connectedness? 

1.        Check your email, two- three times a day.  No more.  The Executive Briefing in HR Magazine suggests “e-mail free” times to help workers deal with information overload. Check your email at the beginning of the work day, before or after lunch and finally about an hour before leaving the office or end the workday.  

2.       Don’t take a device that allows you to be connected into a meeting if you can’t resist the urge to log on. 

By doing these two things, the majority of the day you aren’t connected because your email system is not “engaged”.  Therefore, you aren’t distracted when trying to complete other work.  Important tasks get completed and you can give meetings and people you’re with full attention because you aren’t constantly checking your inbox or the internet.

1)      If an email isn’t important or urgent, but needs some attention at some point, classify it as a task on your to-do list, assign it a date and forget about it until it pops up on that to-do list.  Attach important information you need to that task so you can be prepared with the information you need when you go to complete it, which also helps information overload.  In my next post I’ll talk more about considering urgency.

What do you do to manage your connectedness?  Where do you find it hardest to disconnect? 

Information Overload

An executive briefing titled “Too Much Information” in HR Magazine’s January 2011 issue stated, “62% (of workers) admitted that the quality of their work suffers at times because they can’t sort through the information they need fast enough.”  

“Some U.S. Professionals said they spend half their workday receiving and managing information.”   I am working with a company now that has a process for everything.  Because of the sheer multitude of information in the processes and the pace at which business is moving, when a process needs to be referenced to figure out how to perform a new task or operate a machine correctly, they don’t turn to the process because of information overload. Production workers feel like it takes too much time to find what they need to answer their question.  What took someone lots of time and thought in order to draft  standardized processes gets abandoned because it is simply what the workers see as too much information to deal with.   The Executive Briefing goes on to state, “to cope (with information overload), 91% of U.S. workers admit to deleting or discarding work information without reading it.”

The HR Magazine briefing goes on to state that “Nine of 10 U.S. professionals say they need to search for old e-mails or documents at least once a week and not being able to access the right information at the right time results in a huge waste of time.”

So in this age of information overload, what can we do to cope?  I suggest a few things:

1.       Have a mechanism for organizing your information.  For example, use your email system as a filing system to catalogue and store information that is easily accessible.

2.       Subscribe to services that condense relevant information to your industry or line of work into one email or publication instead of trying to read 7 newspapers, 8 blogs and 10 magazines related to your line of work a day.   For example,  because of the economic and workforce development work I do primarily in the manufacturing sector,  I’m a member of a group that sends me a Manufacturing News Daily that condenses relevant news.

3.       Set aside time to “unplug” everyday.  More on this in the next post, but in short, put your blackberry or your iphone or ipad and/or computer away so you aren’t checking emails constantly causing you to deal with information input constantly.

Please suggest more ways you have or can manage information overload!

Constant Connectedness and Information Overload

I had a realization the other day, I think I have work ADD.  I was frustrated that I couldn’t put my hands on the information I needed to complete a task.  I was constantly referring back to my inbox to find information I needed and with my Outlook open while I was working on the task, every time an email came in, what would I do?  Well open it and read it of course although none of them had anything to do with the task I was striving to complete!   

What is the problem here?  Bottom line, my productivity was being sabotaged.  As a result of:  1. Information Overload and 2.  Constant Connectedness.  The next two posts will address these issues separately by framing each issue and suggesting ways to deal with the problems.

But before these posts come, have you ever felt like you have work ADD because of these issues or others? What do you do to cope?