How a Career Impact Matrix Helped Lucy Showcase Her Skills - CareerEnlightenment.com

How a Career Impact Matrix Helped Lucy Showcase Her Skills In working this week with one of my coaching clients let’s call her Lucy I was reminded of how a powerful but little known job search tool can help someone get a better job faster. Lucy is a successful middle manager with a well know consumer brand you probably are using right now.Lucy was being considered for a promotion in her company. She was struggling to find a concise but compelling way to communicate her career successes to her interviewers. She knew one of her interviewers, the departmental VP, was a big picture person who would weary of listening to her recite her career accomplishments.Enter the Career Impact Matrix? (CIM), the tool Lucy use to ace her interview! The CIM goes way beyond a resume in its ability to clearly and concisely describe the impact Lucy has delivered in her career.   While a resume typically lists quantifiable accomplishments under each employer, the CIM focuses on a level of detail that more deeply quantifies and validates her achievements. Save d as a single page PDF, it becomes the perfect downloadable career search tool to differentiate your LinkedIn profile.Creating the Career Impact Matrix. It is easy to create CIM in any word processing program that utilizes tables. First, establish your three or four most important career accomplishment categories. These are the areas in which you can demonstrate multiple successes that were quite impactful to the employers you served during your career. These topical categories form the vertical axis of the matrix.The following four columns should appear across the top, horizontal axis of the table:Initiative Name / Objective. This is a high level description of projects or programs. Specific employers are not mentioned, and similar projects and programs are synthesized for the purposes of showing their broad combined results in the Organizational Scope and Horizon Impact Lucy chose three sections for this: Talent Development (where she could showcase her people-development accompli shments), Strategic Initiatives (where she could point to her success in developing programs to help her employers achieve their objectives), and Brand Development (where she could how the impact she’s had on making this US brand a global brand.Organizational Scope. This should include the numbers of people by level (and departments) who were directly affected, or who participated in the project or program. In Lucy’s case, it wasn’t just the people in her company that were affected, but the points of distribution that sold her products.Horizon Impact. This is the timeline involved. For ongoing programs or projects indicate the initial calendar quarter they started, through to “current.” You can show multiple flights of the same project. One of Lucy’s projects spanned multiple employers.Specific Impact to the Organization. Here, in bullet-point format, show key aspects of projects and programs as well as their outcomes (measurable if you have the metrics). This section bl ew Lucy’s interviewers away when they saw just how impactful her results have been.Make certain to embed keywords and key phrases in this document that are associated with your current and target career objectives. Want to Read More Articles Like This One?Sign up here to receive weekly updates from Career Enlightenment, and never miss another powerful job searching tip! SUBSCRIBE! You have Successfully Subscribed!We hate spam too. Unsubscribe any time. Here’s an example of a  Career Impact Matrix that I developed for a friend eight years ago.Career Impact Matrix for Experienced Workers. Experienced workers have likely delivered more (and more significant) accomplishments by virtue of more years as working adults. Consider your career as a whole. Note the example for John Smith, a senior manager involved in organizational development for multiple employers in his 23 year career. He has listed the combined results of similar projects and programs in two columns, Organizational Scope and Horizon Impact. In this way he is demonstrating both the longevity of repeated successes and the total measurable impact each has had.Career Impact Matrix for Inexperienced Workers. Just because someone is inexperienced does not mean they cannot use a CIM to differentiate themselves from their competitors for positions of interest. By age 24 a person has accumulated six to eight years’ experience through summer and part-time jobs, internships, school activities, volunteer work, and class work. Bear in mind that a CIM is a tool that sizes for a person’s relative experiences. A 24-year old is likely competing with similarly experienced people, most of whom will never create a CIM for themselves.   Thus one could argue that a CIM is more impactful for a less experienced worker! The key is to identify the top three or four areas in which impactful contributions have been made, where the impact can be described and quantified. Less experienced workers might want to conside r a larger font and larger margins if quantifiable accomplishments are light.Additional Uses for Your Career Impact Matrix. In addition to embedding it on your LinkedIn and other professional profiles associated with your career search, it should be utilized as a final page of your resume and a clean copy printed out on resume paper and brought to job interviews. Make sure you place your contact information on the CIM in the event that it gets separated from your associated documents.How Lucy Used Her Career Impact Matrix.  During her next interview she was asked why she would be the best candidate for the position. Lucy said, “Here’s a one-page snapshot of my contributions and the impact they have made. You want someone who will make a real difference…and that is who I am.”The look on the VP’s face was priceless as his eyes widened as he looked over Lucy’s Career Impact Matrix.“Wow,” he said.   “Do you think you can do that here?”“Give me the right resources a nd I’ll make it happen,” replied Lucy.The rest of their discussion focused on what resources she’d need to get started, including her new title and compensation. She starts her new position next Monday.Bottom Line: looking for a way to gain an edge over everyone else who is interviewing for a key position? Then incorporate a Career Impact Matrix? in your search. It is a powerful way to showcase your accomplishments and the difference they have made.