Achievements form a key part of your career management activities and help to distinguish you from the competition. They also:

• Help you to identify your skills and define the benefits you bring to an organisation
• Form the basis of a strong resume
• Become the centre piece of how you sell yourself at interview
• Help you to feel good about yourself and build positive self-esteem

Elements of achievement statements:

There are basically three elements that form the basis of a written achievement statement:

Problem (circumstance, situation or challenge) you experienced in your job or personal life.

Action you took to overcome the problem.

Result you obtained as a result of the action taken. This is best expressed in numerical terms such as percentages, dollars, days, sales, volumes etc.

Guide to writing achievement statements:

• Statements should always be in the past tense as you are relating something that has already happened
• Use action verbs as they make achievement statements seem alive. You can use more than one action verb per achievement eg developed and managed, but don't use the same action verb for every statement
• You can either start with the result and then work backwards to the action or problem, or start with the action and proceed to the problem or result
• Where possible try and quantify results using numbers, percentages or dollars and state what the result was, who benefited and how
• Though achievements should be more than one sentence they should not be lengthy i.e. no more than three sentences. In the first instance it is a good idea to draft in detail the 'problem', 'action' and 'result' and then edit it down to 2 or 3 sentences

Sample achievement statements:

• Designed and delivered customer needs' based selling skills for the marketing and sales force via provision of appropriate sales tools and key selling messages which resulted in a 20% increase in sales revenue.
• Initiated an analysis of product costings that provided the foundation for strategic decision making and restructuring initiatives. This transformed a $2M loss into a $4M profit within a twelve month period.
• Reduced bad debt write-offs from 5% to 0.75% by negotiating timed payment agreements with borrowers.
• Awarded 'Employee of the Month' for excellent customer service - became the key point of contact for major customers.
• Implemented a strategic value based pricing approach, based on understanding customer needs, which resulted in a gross margin increase of 45% in Q1-3.

Find our more on achievements here