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Accomplishment statements power-up your the skills and experiences in your resume. Impress your potential employer with your brilliant accomplishments!
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Gone are the days of just listing generic job duties on your resume or cover letter. Recruiters and hiring managers want to see your accomplishments – what makes you stand out as a candidate among hundreds of other applicants for the job. Accomplishment statements illustrate your effectiveness in your previous jobs, and highlight the qualitative and quantitative results you’ve achieved.
Accomplishment statements make your “job responsibilities” pop off the page of your resume. It is critical to match your skills and accomplishments to the job description you’re applying to, and powerful accomplishment statements are the way to do it.
This exercise will help you build your accomplishments into the professional experience section of your resume, but you can also use them throughout your job search to create effective cover letters, and to craft strong talking points for your job interviews. You can even feature these powerful statements on your LinkedIn profile and other social media to attract the eye of recruiters!
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This article is the fourth in our series on writing successful resumes and cover letters. Read ’em all:
Then, of course, you need to sit down and do some writing. Unless this is a big challenge for you, and you’re feeling stuck. In that case…
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In this video, Joanie Donnelly, our Resume and Cover Letter Expert, tells you how to craft powerful accomplishment statements to get the most impact out of your resumes.
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Effective accomplishment statements incorporate the “CAR” method: Challenge, Action, Result. Not just a plainly stated list of the typical duties of your previous jobs or volunteer positions, your list of accomplishments illustrates the challenges you’ve faced at work, and how you’ve prevailed over them! Each accomplishment should be in an active voice and tell a story of your glorious achievements!
Action verbs and tangible, or measurable, results are the keys to writing powerful statements like these:
If you are applying for a new line cook job at a local bistro, your potential employer already knows the tasks involved in the job. But what they want to know is: how did you handle those responsibilities? In this way, a bullet point of “Vegetable prep,” an obvious, rote responsibility, then becomes a specific action item with a quantifiable result:
“Prepped vegetables for salads and soup stock on a nightly basis to meet the need for a 300 customer volume per shift.”
Whenever it’s possible, make sure to quantify! If the accomplishment is less numerically concrete, use descriptive statements to illustrate the achievement:
“Achieved ongoing media responsiveness by building partnerships with local radio stations.”
The CAR method can enhance your preparation for interviews, too!
Following are strong examples of accomplishment statements from successful job seekers we’ve coached over the years, across a variety of fields. Use these as an inspiring template as you think about your own work accomplishments and begin to formulate accomplishment statements for your resumes and cover letters.
Be specific: When writing accomplishment statements for high-tech jobs, it is extremely important to include the required tools, languages, and platforms listed in the job description.
Think about your work experience and the activities you were most proud of for each job. And, in accomplishment statements, it’s okay to brag a little! What was the challenge, the action you took, and the result? Save and print the following chart to craft your accomplishment statements. While this chart has room for you to brainstorm accomplishments for many positions, it is fine to set a goal of articulating three to five key accomplishments that are most relevant to each specific new job you are applying for.
The accomplishment statements on your resume are your chance to brag a little about your achievements in your work or volunteer life. The challenge, action, result structure allows you to tell a story, situating you in your hero’s journey, encountering and tackling all obstacles! Use this exercise to think about the work you’re most proud of, and prepare three to five accomplishment statements for each unique application process for a new job.
You need to know how to identify and incorporate resume keywords to write a winning resume that will beat applicant tracking systems (ATS). Here’s how.
Learn how to write your best cover letter with these 11 essential elements. Make a great first impression on your prospective employer, and land that interview!
Plan your resume to showcase your most relevant skills and experience right up front to catch the eye of recruiters and ATS software.
This guide to resume writing is packed with successful resume examples and the most up-to-date strategies to write a resume that’ll win you the job interview.
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