How to Write an Amazing Brag Book
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to speak at one of Bossed Up’s webinars addressing how to Write Your Next Level Resume. The video is still live and you can view it here.
What I learned in presenting this webinar is there are plenty of smart, dedicated, hard-working professionals out there who have never heard of the concept of a Brag Book. Well, welcome to this blog post, where we will walk through what a Brag Book is, what you should include in it, and how to maintain it easily.
Brag Book? Huh!?
It’s a book, a document, a list, etc. where you store all your accomplishments and awesome work throughout the year. Sounds simple enough, right? It is quite simple, yet plenty of people don’t do it and come annual review time, they are staring at a blank self-evaluation document watching the cursor taunt them as they try to remember what it was they have done the past year.
Results matter. Knowing the projects you are working on, their impact, and your value to your company or your employer is important. It helps inform decisions on raises, bonuses, and helps you determine your own worth. It also helps you should you find you aren’t being valued the way you assess you should be, take the leap toward writing a killer resume that gets you a job faster. It’s hard to debate numbers, and it’s even harder to debate good talent on their worth when they are sitting across from you asking for a raise and they have the data to back up their value to your company.
What Should Be In My Brag Book?
The key components of a worthy Brag Book are:
- Projects
- Significant Responsibilities
- Financial Goals and Results
- Awards
- Qualitative Achievements
Track Financial Goals
This is where you track the money. Follow it wherever it goes. Whether you helped earn it through sales goals or marketing goals, helped save it through better processes, better tools, or projects you’ve worked on, or helped better track where it’s going and how its being spent.
Track Tasks & Projects
This is where you track the projects you’ve worked on; whether big or small, these can help you identify both quantitative and qualitative goals to add to your resume. Remember to identify the goal of the project, what was accomplished, and what was learned from it, in addition to positives wins for the projects, such as costs, savings, and time.
Track Leadership
Being involved in a project is great, but what about leading a project? Be sure to identify those opportunities where you were able to lead a team, project, committee, or served in an outside organization in a leadership capacity related to your field or industry.
Track Awards
This might sound obvious, but people often forget that awards are the result of some sort of hard work or imitative that goes above and beyond the normal duties of an employee at your company. Track those and the reason you received them – not just that you did in fact receive one.
Track Qualitative Achievements
Not everything can be measured. This is where tracking your qualitative achievements is important. Track when the projects or initiatives you participated in helped to move the needle forward on some larger overarching goal of the company, such as improving morale, resolving complaints faster, reducing staff turnover, and helping to create a department that didn’t exist before.
Track New Skills
Did you get a certification or learn a new language? Add this accomplishment to your brag book. Even if it doesn’t fit perfectly into desired skill set, learning new skills are Brag worthy accomplishments that should be celebrated and documented. Plus, should you ever try to leverage your skills into a new field, career path, or your own business, you will have these well-documented in your Brag Book!
How to Track?
The first component of any good Brag Book is a metric. The key metrics of any company are can be broken down into three core components: time, money, or resources. When you write down your projects, goals, tasks, skills, etc. be sure to attach a metric to them. Is there a time associated with this project, which you exceeded or met? Or a cost savings associated with the acquisition of your new skill? Or perhaps a resource that can be better allocated as a result of your qualitative achievement? At the end of the day, I always recommend tracking all three components: time, money, and resources because they each can reveal their own successes with time. Some projects have the result of short-term improved resource allocation and the long-term result of major savings. You won’t know this without tracking both components.
When to Track?
At the beginning of any new project, duh. Well, I would imagine most professionals have some way of tracking their projects. But are they all tracking these other components? Probably not. And this is where you can set yourself apart. Make tracking part of your Monthly Recap. It’s easier to keep track of all this when you have a clear system in place for organizing your goals.
Where do I track these things?
Your Brag Book is for you. It’s to make your life easier, so I recommend using a tool or method that you already feel comfortable with when tracking your brag-worthy achievements. I have seen people use Word, Excel, OneNote, Evernote, Todoist, Outlook, Google Calendars, or good old-fashioned pen and paper. I am a pen and paper girl myself. I love technology, but there is something super satisfying about writing my achievements down on paper. Sometimes I think…maybe I should frame this? On second thought, maybe not.
What’s my go-to place to track to my accomplishments? Click-Up. Never heard of it? Here’s a screenshot of a sample version of my Brag Book below. Click-Up is a FREE tool that let’s you organize data and information in a sortable and colorful way. Want to try it out for free?
Should I include physical versions of my resume, transcripts, etc.
I have read that some people take brag books quite literally. They put together full-on scrapbooks of themselves that include photos and transcripts from high school, college, etc. Although that looks really nice, I find the most useful information the most practical information. I use my Brag Book as a one-page tool to help me understand my value to my organization. And as much as I would like to think my organization cares about my high school graduation photos, they don’t. What they care about is that I can help make their organization one that either: saves time, saves or makes more money, or expends less effort on acquiring resources (human resources, products, equipment & services, etc.) on achieving goals, initiatives, and growth. This is what my Brag Book centers around and I know it’s why my Brag Book has been my go-to resource for every annual review and resume re-write.
With that being said, I keep a separate folder on my Dropbox with letters of recommendations I have scanned in from prior firms and companies. This is a good practice to get into and I highly recommend saving these for later. But they don’t need to be printed out and can be easily captured in your Brag Book.
