Articulating Your Experience

Articulating Your Experience for a Job Search

Monday, February 6, 2023

by Annelise Norman

So you landed the killer internship with your dream company, have loved every second, and now your time there is drawing to a close. What’s your next move? What do you do with this experience and the professional relationships you’ve formed?

Just because an internship, summer job, or study abroad experience ends doesn’t mean you will stop benefitting from the experience. In fact, it’s really important that you continue engaging with your professional experiences once they are over. Reflecting on your experiences will help you process what you’ve learned and how you’ve grown so that you can use that information to guide your decisions about your future. Get into the habit of documenting your experiences while they’re still fresh. You’ll learn so much about yourself, and it will make your future job search much, much easier.

Here's the thing, though: this takes work. Articulating your experience for job materials isn’t about jotting down a bullet-list of all the tasks you did; it’s actually a two-stage composition process. First, you have to reflect on your experience to identify and sort out meaningful details about the work you did and the lessons you learned. Only then can you begin to translate those takeaways into résumé entries and interview answers. Reflecting and translating are two different cognitive tasks. Be kind to yourself: don’t try to do them simultaneously because it will hurt. I promise. The outcome is always about as awkward as trying to pat your head and rub your stomach simultaneously in public. So please, give your job documents the craft and care they deserve. Your noggin and future hiring managers will thank you.

Reflect.

Where to begin? If you’re feeling particularly jazzed about a project you worked on or a big win you had in your position, go ahead and write about those things. When you run out of steam, think about the scaffolding and purpose of your experience. Experiential learning opportunities are designed to deliver impact and help you learn in a practical, immediate environment. Think about the intended outcomes for experiential learning activities (listed below) and see how your own experience measures up. You might have learned more than you initially thought!

  • Experiencing/Exploring: “Doing”
    • You should perform some hands-on or minds-on task without too much hand holding from an instructor or supervisor. You’re given a certain degree of independence in trying something new. A key facet of experiential learning is what the student learns from the experience rather than the quantity or quality of the experience.
  • Sharing/Reflecting: “What Happened?”
    • Share your results, reactions, and observations with your friends, mentors, or other people in your life. This sharing equates to reflecting on what you discovered and relating it to past experiences, which can be drawn from in future contexts.
  • Processing/Analyzing: “What’s Important?”
    • Discuss, analyze, and reflect upon your experience. Describing and analyzing experiences allows you to relate them to future learning and life experiences. Think about the details – how was the experience carried how? How did personal insights, problems, or issues emerge as a result of the experience? How were specific problems or issues addressed, and how might you identify recurring themes in future experiences?
  • Generalizing: “So What?”
    • Connect your experience with other real-world examples. Look for trends or common truths that emerged during your experience, and think about any life lessons you might have learned. What is going to change about your life or your approach now that you’ve had this experience?
  • Application: “Now What?”
    • Your experience should provide you with opportunities for application. Did you apply what you learned during the experience (and from past experiences and classes) to a new situation? Have you thought about how a new process you’ve learned can be applied to other situations? Did you develop any new or effective behaviors that could translate to other environments? You should feel a sense of ownership for what you learned.

Translate.

Now that you’ve done the hard part of taking inventory of your experiences, knowledge, skills, and qualifications, you are ready to translate these insights into outcomes for résumé entries and interview talking points. It’s important to note that your job materials should be tailored to specific job postings – you shouldn’t send in the same résumé for a digital marketing position as you would for a middle school teaching position. But you can and should create foundational entries about your experiences that can be adapted for different job postings.

Bullet Points

Bullet points should show relevant skills and qualities to prospective employers. Be specific about what you did and how you did it. Be concise and always start off with strong action verbs. Provide necessary context to inform the reader about the purpose of your work, the scope of the project/work, and what you produced or accomplished. Quantify your work and achievements wherever possible.

Thinking back to your skills and experiences inventory from the reflection stage, what skills and qualities do you want to showcase to future employers? Did you practice things like organization, analytical thinking, professionally communication, or creative problem solving during your experience? What situations in your previous experience challenged you to demonstrate skills or allowed you to apply the skills and knowledge you already had? What was the outcome?

Example

Skills/qualities you want to show: initiative, organization, analytical thinking, writing, interpersonal skills, problem solving

Situation: The office staff could not easily locate client profiles to share with prospective clients and industry partners.

Task: Help staff locate and identify the appropriate client profile documents quickly and efficiently.

Action: Initiated, inventoried, and maintained the first client profile directory for the office’s business development team. Successfully presented the directory to management and staff and trained the office on its use and maintenance. Implemented the directory entry system into portfolio creation.

Result: At the end of the week, business development staff members were able to locate and identify appropriate client profiles using the directory to search by narrow criteria; the directory was adopted across the office and is still in use.

Bullet point for résumé: Initiated, inventoried, and maintained the first client profile directory for the office’s business development team, which made locating certain client profiles quicker and more efficient, was adopted across the office, and is still in use today.

As you can see, specificity and metrics are key in writing competitive résumé entries. Be concise, but not so brief that your descriptions sound generic. Avoid bullet points like this:

Public Health Society, Events Coordinator – June 2020 – July 2022

    • Organized events and panels

What did this person do to organize events and panels? What skills did they use? How many people did they host at these events? What was their impact on the Public Health Society through the events they coordinated? Instead, be demonstrative:

Public Health Society, Events Coordinator – June 2020 – July 2022

    • Planed and coordinated panels on public health for audiences of 25–50 undergraduates on a bi-monthly basis
    • Identified and contacted health professionals in the community to participate in panels
    • Created marketing materials and publicized events through social media

Interview Anecdotes

As you prepare for job interviews, research positions and companies to help guide your thinking when developing anecdotes to share about your experience and qualifications. Refer back to your experience inventory and apply these questions to your past experiences and the insights you gleaned from your initial reflections.

  1. What did you do? When did you do it? What was your role?
  2. What challenged you about the experience?
  3. How did you take ownership of the experience?
  4. What did you learn from the experience and/or your mentor?
  5. How do you see yourself progressing from this experience? What are your professional next steps?

Now, think about your answers to these questions and use the STAR method to integrate and synthesize your examples to prepare your anecdotes for interviews:

  • Situation – Set the scene and give necessary details for your example.
  • Task – Describe what your responsibility was in that situation.
  • Action – Explain exactly what steps you took to address it.
  • Result – Share what outcomes your actions achieved.

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind during the translating phase is audience awareness. Think about the context in which you are articulating your experience – while brevity will take you far with résumé entries, compelling anecdotes are going to take you further in an interview. Think about who is going to be reading or interacting with your articulated experiences, and aim to create documents and prepare for interviews or correspondence with this target audience in mind. The more specific you are in your communications, the more persuasive you will be to employers and hiring managers in offering a full impression of yourself. It’s not enough to tell someone that you possess certain qualifications – you have to demonstrate them. You did that in your previous experiences, so translate those skills into the language these industries, employers, and other decision makers use.

Annelise Norman holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia, where she currently works as the Scholarships & Public Relations Coordinator for the Office of Experiential Learning. Annelise can be contacted at anorm94@uga.edu. For the latest news and announcements from EL, follow us on Instagram.