Achievement Journal: a valuable tool for professional growth
What is an achievement journal? Why should you keep one? And how do you use it? Jump in and let's discover it together.
One point I touched in my previous article is to employ an achievement journal to give visibility to your accomplishments.
This article will delve into the "why," "what," and "how" of keeping an achievement journal, and elaborate on the reasons it can be a valuable tool for your professional growth.
Why keeping an Achievement Journal
Have you ever struggled to recall specific accomplishments when reflecting on past weeks or months? It's a common experience. You were undoubtedly busy: participating in numerous meetings, leading discussions, crafting design documents, and implementing various features. However, pinpointing the specifics of your contributions can be challenging.
This is precisely why maintaining an achievement journal is a valuable practice. By documenting your contributions, you gain the opportunity to reflect on them and identify what made them noteworthy before time diminishes the details. During performance review season, when your manager asks "How did you contribute to the team's mission?" you'll have a readily available record to reference.
Reflecting on your contributions also allows you to assess how your efforts align with the skills required for your desired career path. This can help you strategically direct your future work to gain exposure to all the competencies you aim to develop. While excelling in one area is commendable, ensure you're not neglecting others.
Maintaining an achievement journal can also improve your self-esteem. Software engineering is a field known for fostering feelings of impostor syndrome. Interviews with prominent software engineers often reveal that even they experience these feelings at times. If seasoned professionals experience this, you're certainly not alone. However, compiling a list of your achievements will showcase your accomplishments and highlight your continuous growth – a surefire confidence booster.
To summarize:
🧠 don’t forget the important things
📚 have a reference of your contributions
💪 direct your growth
💆 boost your self-estime
What’s an achievement anyway?
So, you're sold on the idea of an achievement journal. You've chosen your tool and template, and now it's time to fill it up. But what exactly qualifies as an achievement?
The definition of an achievement depends on your current experience level and your career aspirations. Here are some guidelines:
💪 Growth: Did a project push your technical skills beyond their comfort zone? Include it!
🎯 Impact: Did your work have a measurable positive effect on your team or the organization? This is a definite achievement.
The key is to strike a balance between overestimating your contributions and undervaluing your accomplishments.
Over-inclusion: Listing every single task you complete might inflate the importance of your work. Focus on impactful projects that showcase your growth.
Under-inclusion: Struggling to identify noteworthy achievements? This could indicate a lack of self-recognition or a need for more challenging opportunities.
If you can't think of any recent achievements, consider discussing this with your manager during your next one-on-one meeting. They can help you recognize your contributions and identify opportunities for skill development.
By openly communicating, your manager can guide you towards more challenging tasks and help highlight accomplishments you might have overlooked.
Capturing Your Achievements
So, you've identified an achievement worthy of your journal – fantastic! Now, let's get it documented.
Choosing Your Tool:
The beauty of achievement journals lies in their flexibility. You have a multitude of options: from familiar tools like Google Docs or Microsoft Word to note-taking apps like Notion or Obsidian, or even a simple text file. Ultimately, the tool itself isn't critical, but consider these factors:
🌐 Easy Sharing: Ideally, your chosen tool allows for easy sharing of a read-only, synced view of your journal. This can be really handy if you ever want to share it with others, like your manager.
🔐 Ownership: Use a platform you control, independent of your employer. This ensures you maintain ownership of your achievements across different jobs.
Structuring Your Entry:
There isn’t a strict rule on how to structure your journal, it is really up to you and what you are interested in tracking. Here’s a basic structure that I found working well:
Date and Title: Start with the date and a concise but descriptive title that clearly identifies the achievement.
Competencies: Identify the relevant skills exercised by this achievement. If your company has a defined career track with competency levels, reference that framework. Alternatively, discuss your growth areas with your manager to ensure alignment.
Evidence: Provide links to concrete proofs of your achievement. This could be a pull request demonstrating a technical skill, a cross-cutting design document you authored, meeting notes reflecting your impactful leadership, or documentation related to a particularly complex sale you supported from the engineering side.
Storytelling: Move beyond dry facts and tell the story! Describe the context of your work, the challenges you faced, and the successful resolution. Stories are powerful tools for conveying experiences and growth to others. They allow people to see a situation from your point of view.
Pro Tip: Leverage Retrospectives
Congratulations, you've become a journaling pro when it comes to capturing your achievements! But here's a secret weapon to take it to the next level: retrospectives.
Schedule regular time (quarterly is a good start) to revisit your journal. Analyze your accomplishments and how they align with your growth goals. Consider involving your manager in this discussion for valuable feedback. Instead of a generic "How am I doing?", use your achievements as a springboard for specific feedback on your progress.
Retrospectives are also a fantastic way to ensure your manager is aware of your progress. It can be challenging to keep track of individual accomplishments, especially in remote teams. Open discussions ensure your manager actively observes and recognizes your contributions, which can have a significant impact on your short-term career growth.
Conclusion
Sure, keeping an achievement journal might sound a bit like bragging at first. But as you've seen, it's actually a super beneficial practice with multiple benefits:
Pump up your confidence: Seeing all you've accomplished is a surefire self-esteem booster.
Track your growth: It helps you visualize your progress and how your skills are developing.
Get noticed: A well-maintained journal can increase your manager's visibility into your contributions
🤙 that’s it for this one
That is it from me! If you enjoyed (…or hated) this article let me know in the comments, and feel free to connect and reach out on LinkedIn.
Until the next one… allons-y!