Unemployment Chronicles, Day 10: SOARing

The plan for today was to start working on improving my resume by listing out some of the accomplishments I want to highlight.  Because this is the world of business, we can't do this without an acronym.  Having a cutesy acronym for something that is relatively straightforward is giving me PTSD flashbacks to work, but hey, at least I have experience with this kind of thing.  Oh yeah, very accustomed to that.  They actually mentioned my current least favorite acronym -- SMART goals -- at the first outplacement meeting, and I lived through that, so no worries.

OK, no peeking ahead, see if you can guess today's acronym.  Here's a hint:  Check the title of this post!  Give up?  The acronym is SOAR.  Just like that bird over there.  SOAR stands for Situation, Obstacles, Actions, Results.  It's a way to help tell your success stories, the things you want to put on your resume or talk about during an interview.

Anyway, acronyms aside, this is not a difficult exercise for me.  My materials suggest creating 10 to 20 of them, and at first that seemed a little daunting without my performance reviews to consult.  Then I thought of 26 items pretty easily, so I am working on narrowing the list down to 20.  I have accomplished a lot over the years, plenty of things I am proud of.

The next thing is to translate those accomplishments to a resume.  Building a resume is not one of the ten steps to a new job; it's more like a prerequisite.  I'll see if I can post it here when I'm done.