CV Development for PMO Professionals

Module Five – Your Key Achievements

Hi, welcome back to the fifth module.

In this session, we take a look at key achievements.

Key achievements are on the CV to draw the hirer’s attention to what makes you stand out; what you have done in your career where you have gone over and above and made a real difference.

I’ll be honest, they are tricky to write for a number of reasons and we’ll cover those in the module.

Key achievements can be written in a separate area of the CV – normally between the personal summary and the career history. Alternatively, you can opt to include key achievements against a particular job in your career history.

Personally, I opt for the separate area and I’ll tell you why that is the case.

Let’s get started:

Getting Started With Key Achievements

Placing key achievements on the front of the CV (between the personal summary and the career history) works well for a number of reasons:

You are putting those achievements right in the shop window rather than burying them within each part of your career.
You’re able to use achievements from throughout your career so it’s a great way to give them the attention and focus they deserve, regardless of when they happened in your career.
You can change your achievements for each position you’re applying for, making sure keywords are prominent.
It strengths the CV – between a strong personal summary and a concise and clear career history – it’s the glue between the two.
They’re more likely to get read when they have their own section rather than bolted onto a particular job.

For key achievements to work for you, regardless of where you opt to place them on your CV, they have to be well-written and they really do have to be KEY achievements.

Key Achievements are NOT:

the normal day to day things you do in your role

Key Achievements are:

something that you personally did that had a positive impact for the project/ and or the organisation.
- It will be unique to you – only you achieved it (not the team!)
- It will clearly show what was achieved
- It will state what skills you used to do it
- It will show the outcome – as a result or benefit.

Here’s the basic formula of a key achievement:

Success (the result/benefit) + skills + how + reward

The key to a good Key Achievement is storytelling. The short paragraph has to be a self-contained story starting with the Success and then showing how this was achieved at the same time as highlighting key skills.

When you write a Key Achievement for the first time you should keep challenging yourself with the words, “So What?”. Is the success you’ve chosen good enough, would a hirer care? Keep pushing yourself with ‘so what?’ until you uncover a great key achievement worth sharing.

Key Achievement Example

Here’s a typical example from a project support level CV.

It’s for a Project Support Officer supporting a group of project managers in the IT department of a healthcare regulatory body.

Improved the communications and visibility across all projects by establishing a central Sharepoint presence, generating and managing all the content.

SO WHAT?

How were the communications improved? Is there a measurement of improvement? Or was it based on something like customer satisfaction? Was ‘establishing Sharepoint’ ran like a project perhaps? Or was it done within a tight deadline? Was this something that was over and above the normal duties of the role? It doesn’t sound like it is.

Here’s another example:

Reducing month end project reporting timescale by 2 working days through increasing the efficiency of reporting within the PMO and setting up a month end timetable for use within the department.

SO WHAT?

The success is the reduction in time – as we all know, time is precious and the month-end process can be too long with delays in getting information out to the right people when they need it.

The skill was around the reporting process itself – making the changes to streamline it. There’s no need to get into details here, that will get picked up in the interview which is exactly what you want.

The how was the introduction of a timetable – again a good story for the interview.

The reward is missing – as a result of the reduction in time – what else could be achieved with the time saved?

Listen to the Video

In this 53 minute video you can get more detail on creating your key achievements: