According to recent research, many employees value becoming a leader at work. Sixty-five percent of Gen Z graduates say that developing advanced skills is essential to their definition of career success. Forty percent say the same about advancing to a senior-level role. (1)
Truthfully, employees of all ages desire to be recognized as leaders, and many take on those roles in their daily work. However, they may also run into trouble when trying to properly convey those experiences to set themselves apart and command more during the job search process.
As a career coach, here’s how you can help your clients develop the competence and the confidence to stand out as leaders.
Help them identify specific leadership experiences
If your client has never been promoted to a formal leadership role, it can be challenging for them to identify leadership experiences in their work history.
To help them overcome this hurdle, it may be a good idea to do an exercise with them where they write down all the instances they can remember in which they took the initiative, motivated a team, or made an impactful decision that led to team success.
If they’re still having trouble coming up with those experiences, you may want to ask them specific questions that might help them identify leadership experiences:
Has your client ever volunteered for a challenging task that no one else wanted?
Has your client pointed out a problem to a supervisor and offered a solution?
Has your client ever given feedback to another person about their work?
Has your client ever been asked to mediate a conflict between employees?
Has your client ever provided guidance and support to a newer employee?
Does your client regularly have to make time-sensitive decisions under pressure?
All of these situations count as leadership experiences and may be appropriate to include in a resume or talk about during an interview.
Understand which experiences are most relevant to the role
Once your client has identified their leadership experiences, you can have them determine which of those experiences are most relevant to the job. To assess the level of relevancy, have your client comb through the job description and figure out which key leadership skills the hiring manager wants.
For example, the job description may indicate that the company wants someone who can work and communicate well with others.
In this case, your client can highlight times when they have coordinated projects between cross-functional teams, mentored younger employees, or negotiated better pricing with a vendor.
Employ effective storytelling techniques
It’s crucial that your client is able to tell a compelling story about their leadership experiences. To do this, you can help them learn to write and speak about these experiences in three critical steps:
Clarify the problems and challenges they faced
Specify the solution they used to solve those problems
Underscore the positive outcomes achieved as a result of those solutions
Telling the story of their leadership experiences this way accomplishes several important things. It helps them create a compelling narrative without sacrificing clarity or conciseness. Additionally, it gives your client a standardized format they can duplicate for future applications.
Use powerful and specific language in the resume and cover letter
When your client is conveying their leadership experiences in a resume or interview, it’s important for them to come across clearly and confidently. One way to do that is to quantify their leadership successes. For example, they can:
Tell that their solution resulted in being able to deliver a project 20% under budget
Outline how their expertise decreases time to delivery by 12% on average
Showcase the fact that they currently mentor five entry-level employees
Showcase how their suggestions have led to a 15% increase in productivity
Using numbers in this way helps show the hiring manager that their leadership experiences have led to tangible business impact.
In addition to quantifying successes, it’s also important to use powerful action verbs to describe specific achievements. For example, your client can use verbs like:
Advocated
Collaborated
Motivated
Supervised
Transformed
Developed
Managed
All of these words show that your client has stepped up to lead the charge in their workplace.
Use resume structure to their advantage
In most fields, your client will likely use a reverse chronological format for their resume. Even if they’re using a standard resume, there are ways to ensure that they maximize this standard format to highlight their leadership skills. See the resource on Jobseeker for more insight into highlighting leadership skills on your resume.
One of the most obvious places your client can add leadership skills is in a dedicated skills section. Here, they can add skills like change management, problem-solving, mentoring, and adaptability, all of which convey initiative.
Additionally, your client can add leadership anecdotes to their professional summary section at the beginning of their resume.
For example, if your client restructured 50% of your user help guides and it resulted in a 62% decrease in redundant support calls, your client can use something like this to grab the hiring manager’s attention and compel them to keep reading.
Finally, your client should definitely be using the bullet points under each job in their experience section to convey leadership. Instead of simply giving the hiring manager a list of mundane tasks, this is the perfect place to highlight instances of leadership in each position. This will be much more impactful to the hiring manager.
Help them highlight the experiences that can take their career to the next level
Though leadership skills can be hard for your client to recognize, it’s important that they do the work to identify them, highlight them on their application, and learn to speak confidently about them.
Not only can this help them recognize how much they’ve achieved in their own career, but it will make them much more likely to get noticed by a hiring manager and finally land the career they want.
Sources:
(1) Handshake: Gen Z brings new expectations to the workplace
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