If you want to get a new job or grow your career this year, tracking your work accomplishments is crucial to preparing you for that next step. Women in the workplace often have to advocate much harder to receive recognition and career advancement. Learning how to arm yourself for these conversations by tracking your work accomplishments early in your career will help you advance faster and using a template to track work accomplishments will make it even easier.
Why You Need to Track Your Work Accomplishments
When you have a record of your work accomplishments, you can use it to update your resume and LinkedIn profile. If you’re applying to new jobs, being able to show not just previous positions you’ve held but concrete successes and improvements you made in that role will make you a more valuable candidate. They’re also incredibly useful as talking points when asking for a raise or promotion or during an interview for a new job.
What is the Best Way to Track Your Work Accomplishments?
Writing down your accomplishments at work in a document or spreadsheet or using a template to track work accomplishments is the easiest way to ensure that you’re prepared to discuss a promotion, raise, or new position. This guide will give you an understanding of what you need to track. Once you’re ready to start, our template for tracking work accomplishments will make it easy to prepare for your next performance review.
5 Essentials to Track Your Accomplishments at Work
1. To-Dos and Goals for the Week
Keeping a to-do list is likely something you already do and is essential to the basic function of your job. However, you can level up your to-do lists when tracking accomplishments. You can do this by writing down your tasks and then adding why it’s important and who it’s helping.
For example, if you are tasked with drafting an email campaign, begin with just the task. Then, for your “who” and “why,” you might add that it’s for the company’s largest client as part of their new product launch. Or, if you’re tasked with gathering data and reporting on your department, your “who” and “why” might be more internally focused. Your “who” might be your direct supervisor, department head, or a member of executive leadership. The “why” of the task might be to track and show successes and areas for improvement to guide business decisions.
2. Work Accomplishments
Accomplishments will sometimes be items moved from your to-do list. Other times, they will record a culmination of many tasks that make up a large project or initiative. This is essential to tracking your work if you want a promotion or raise. Pinpointing your accomplishments, how you’ve advanced the interests of the company, increased revenue, decreased costs, or improved any other aspect of the business is crucial for convincing higher-ups that you’re worth the investment.
When recording your accomplishments, add as much detail as possible. Include not only what the actual accomplishment is but also what project or team it impacted and the timeline. If a new initiative you launched improved customer retention on your sales team within three months, those are details you want to include! This shows you can bring ideas to fruition in a timely manner, effectively track the impact, and report on it. If you’re looking to move up the corporate ladder, showing that you have the skills to identify needs, monitor progress, and communicate results will make you a better candidate for leadership positions.
3. Feedback
No matter how big or small a piece of feedback is, keeping track of where you excel and what you need to work on will help you grow your career faster. A positive feedback track record has the advantage of giving you talking points during a performance review. If you can point to concrete feedback and successes, it’s much easier to communicate the value you’ve brought to your company.
On the flip side, while you don’t want to bring up negative feedback, you’ll be much more likely to improve upon it if you’re actively tracking it. The best way to make monitoring negative feedback productive is to write down the feedback and include a “next step.” You’ll take this action to begin working on that feedback and improving your work performance. Not only will this improve your performance, but you can also use this as evidence of your hard work and ability to take criticism and adapt. Instead of focusing on the negative feedback, present it through the lens of how you’ve proactively improved upon that feedback. This is a great strategy for showing growth during a performance review.
4. New Responsibilities
Were you recently asked to take over running a meeting? Or coordinating an internal training initiative for employees? Any new responsibilities, big or small, should be recorded to show how the scope of your role has changed.
Pointing to new work you’ve taken on will show your boss your ability to take on challenges and more responsibility. While this alone can be a talking point for a promotion or when applying for a new job, it can also be a valuable argument when asking for a raise. If your responsibilities have significantly increased, a raise is much more justified.
When recording your new responsibilities, note who assigned you this new responsibility and the project’s impact. This helps you communicate that you took on new responsibilities and the importance of these responsibilities to the company and your team as a whole.
5. Initiatives
If you’re a self-starter with lots of ideas, it’s crucial that you keep track of ideas that come to fruition. To be a good team player and colleague, you shouldn’t record these initiatives to get credit for their success. Rather, it’s important to note how your ideas are furthering business objectives and how they came to be.
Did you work across several different teams to make this idea a reality? Has the project now become an established part of your company? Did this idea help bring in new talent, increase revenue, or reduce costs? Identify the ideas you initiated, who you worked with, and the ultimate impact of that initiative. This is a great way to show your current employer or an interviewer that you 1) have ideas, 2) follow through on your ideas, 3) can work with many different people and teams to make things happen, and 4) understand the business or industry. These are all salient talking points to convey your value to a company.
How to Track Work Accomplishments with our Work Accomplishments Tracker Template
Now that you understand the importance of tracking your accomplishments at work, it’s time to start doing. We’ve created a template spreadsheet to help you track your work easily – get yours free for a limited time:
