Brag Book: How to Get Ahead in Your Career
Maintaining a portfolio of my accomplishments is one of the most helpful things I’ve done for my career.
I started doing it to be more efficient when it came time to complete my mid-year and year-end reviews. If you’re like me and you work in a corporate environment, you likely dread these assignments. The company I work for has a mandatory template for how we lay out our goals and accomplishments, and it always used to take me forever to reflect on everything I’d worked on and try to regurgitate it in bullet points.
“That’s why I started keeping a “brag book”: a document where I’d list projects, awards, stretch goals, and outcomes that I was proud of. Writing these out as I was working on them saved me way more time when it came to performance reviews. I just use a running Word doc to list them out chronologically, and then organize them based on category (projects, awards, feedback, etc.).”
Keeping track of all these “wins” is also helpful for job-searching and interviewing. To show off my career highlights, I’ve used Canva to create a consolidated version of my brag book into a tidy PDF that is easily shareable (for instance, with leaders that I network with).
I like to keep my real job separate from my blog, but I’m sharing an example of what I’ve put together in the past ☺ I’m keeping a lot of the specific titles and projects generic, but these are all real accomplishments:
To sum up, here are examples of what you can include in your brag book:
Projects you’ve worked on and their results (“Completing an audit of our print materials and transferring 15% of our collateral online resulted in $200K savings”)
Speaking engagements (“Presented to an audience of incoming grad students to highlight the opportunities available in our program”)
Awards you’ve won
Positive feedback from peers
Ratings from past performance evaluations (“Consistently rated as a high-performer in X roles”)
Courses you’ve taken (especially if you can tie them back to projects you’ve worked on!)
Extra-curriculars
As helpful as a brag book is for your performance evals and interviews, it’s also really satisfying to take a look every now and then and just feel proud at how much you’ve accomplished. YOU’RE DOING AMAZING SWEETIE!!
xox