This Simple, 5-Minute Task Could Change Your Career Trajectory

Career Management, Interview, Job Search

It is an unfortunate and true fact that when we land a new job, we tend to become lazy. Now that you’ve got a job, who needs to worry about job searching, right?

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s wrong. Job searching, and the preparation needed for it, never ends. That’s why keeping a job journal is so important.

 

What Is a Job Journal?

It’s exactly what it sounds like: a record of your daily activities. However, it’s all done in Excel (or a similar program).

No matter what job we have, we all can create buckets of responsibilities: administrative tasks, projects, finance, marketing, etc. For example, in my previous life, I was a corporate recruiter, but I also did terminations, new hire orientations, HR information system updates (HRIS) and employee relations.

What are your buckets? Only you know what they are. Once you’ve come up with at least five, label one tab in Excel as each bucket responsibility. Now you’ve set up your template, and every day you will populate it with what you’ve done.

A brief example utilizing my scenario:

  • Monday
    • Recruiting (40 phone calls, 3 in-person interviews [6 hours])
    • Terminations (1 manager)
    • Employee Relations (talked to 5 people re: performance review and boss)
  • Tuesday
    • Recruiting (25 phone calls, 5 in-person interviews, 3 talent management meetings)
    • New hire orientation (10 people)
    • Administration (logging interview/candidate details)
  • Wednesday
    • Recruiting (30 phone calls, 2 in-person interviews, 1 talent management meeting)
    • Employee Relations (talked to 4 people re: career path)
    • HRIS (Benefits reporting and payroll)

I think you get the point here. You can be as general or specific you want, such as adding hours spent on each task. As you can imagine, after a few months of doing this, you will have fantastic historical data to pull from.

Now that you understand the job journal, there are two areas I want to focus on in specific: the importance of keeping a journal for job searching and for your performance review.

 

For Your Job Search

When we’re mentally ready to find a new job, the first thing we do is blow the dust off our resume (figuratively, of course). The majority of people then realize they don’t know where to even start. But for the prepared, it’s easy; they turn to their job journal, as it contains all of their accomplishments, projects and daily responsibilities.

The second area of importance is interviewing, and the biggest challenge for job seekers here is behavioral questions — but what are employers really asking with behavioral questions? Simply put, they want past experiences. People misperceive behavioral questions to be difficult because they can’t recollect all their past experiences, but this should be a thing of the past now. By utilizing your job journal, you are now able to go back and see a detailed, organized and easily understandable list of all your past experiences. A quick study of what you’ve done over the years will bring you up to speed and able to conquer those questions in no time.

 

For Your Performance Review

Putting my old dusty HR hat on for a minute, I remember discussing people’s performance reviews with them. One of the most consistent problems I encountered was people not remembering what they’d done in the past year — simply forgetting.

One of the reasons for the performance review is to discuss how you’ve grown in the past year. The problem with these discussions in today’s world is that both employee and manager forget about all the small stuff they’ve done. This is why keeping a job journal is so important. Could you imagine bringing a journal, or a summarized version of the journal, to your review and saying, “Here is everything great I’ve done”? Talk about an A+ for organization!

 

In the End

By keeping a job journal, you will be making it easier for your boss to give you a bigger raise. (Tweet this thought.) You will remind them of all the great things you’ve accomplished and why you’re deserving of that raise. You’ll also better prepare yourself for the job search, should you find yourself there.

Simply put, if you’re not keeping a job journal, you are only hurting yourself. Add a five-minute task to your calendar for daily recurrence at the end of each day to write down everything you’ve done. It simply takes getting into a rhythm, and then it will be second-nature. I promise the rewards you will reap will outweigh the five minutes a day you spend on it.

Have you ever kept logs of your tasks? Share in the comments!

Image: Flickr

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