#5: Accomplishments

I worked with more than one junior military officer recruiter when I was looking for employment about ten years ago, and one in particular did right by me with one simple piece of advice.   During the period when my representative was working with me on my resume, he pointed out that I was trying to tell the wrong story about my accomplishments.


This revelation threw me off a bit, because I had been, after all, a successful weapons platoon commander of a rifle company, with collateral duties as the embark and ordnance officer, and had been hand-picked to move on a more senior billet after a deployment to Okinawa.  I had a good billet progression and laid out my accomplishments under these billets in my resume.  On my first cuts at a resume, I had annotated the fact that I had successfully embarked and move a company's worth of individual weapons and personal equipment, where nothing had been lost, from California to Okinawa.  I also detailed my routine responsibilities for several millions of dollars of equipment assigned to the company.  I had done my duty in a "highly professional manner that contributed to the company's successful mission accomplishment and well-being of its Marines and Sailors."


Sound like an award citation?  Yeah, it is.  Right out of my award received after that Okinawa employment.  The problem is that although it reads well and says all the right things among military professionals, it doesn't tell a prospective employer the most important thing they want to know about you: What demonstrates that you can save the company money, time, or otherwise improve on its internal processes, and thus contribute to its bottom line in a positive way.


My first recruiter put it to me in an interesting way, and in a flash it all made sense that I had been looking at my resume the wrong way.  It was great that no weapons had become lost during the periods of embarkation to Okinawa, but I wasn't supposed to lose any weapons, so there wasn't anything notable about that fact and it didn't need to be on the resume.  What I needed to do, he explained, was look back on my military experience and analyze it to extract those times when I had changed a process to achieve greater efficiency, had accomplished a task while husbanding scant resources, or otherwise contributed to the unit's bottom line.


Highlighting bullets that spoke to these abilities was difficult at first, because we rarely measure success in the same ways that the corporate world might, but the recruiter coached me through a few ways to look at the issue from a different angle.  This was one of the few occasions in my first post-military job search where a junior military officer recruiter proved beneficial to my job search.


There are several bottom lines in the military that you could back on which can correlate to an accomplishment a corporate employer could find attractive.  Implementing safety and risk management principles to effectively reduce mishaps, and time lost due to injuries, can translate to an ability to save money for a company through reduced workman's compensation.  So does modifying work practices to be more efficient with fewer man hours involved.  And the same can be true if you identify how you made a process more productive.  You could even highlight how you might have instituted physical training or individual development programs that raised the overall PT scores of your troops, or were part of multiple meritorious promotions that your subordinates achieved.


I know it may seem difficult, because we simply do not think of our value as officers in this way, and although our billet accomplishments involve an often arduous, life-threatening existence, the corporate bottom line is just different, but your resume has to tell the right story.  Sometimes, that means taking the spotlight off of you, and putting it on the most important component of our modern military; the people who worked with and for you, and went into harm's way beside you.  How well they performed, if framed in the right context, can tell a lot about you.  The key phrases that make up your personnel evaluation file, or a few awards received along the way, will rarely fit properly into a powerful resume until you think about it from the corporate employer's point of view.