Developing a Federal Resume, Part 2: Selling Yourself Through Accomplishments

This post discusses how to sell yourself to potential Federal government employees by describing your career accomplishments.

Most employers give their staff annual reviews.  In the Federal government, employees are required to provide their supervisors with a self assessment listing all the wonderful things they have accomplished. You will need to rely on your old performance reviews, resumes and other old files for previous jobs.  For your current job, I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes each day to write down your major activities and accomplishments.  This will help you come review time as well as in your job search.

Once you have an initial list of accomplishments, you will need to put them into a form that will help win you interviews. Both the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and career counselors advise using the Challenge-Context-Action-Result Model.  Here’s how OPM describes it:

Challenge. Describe a specific problem or goal. What was the challenge?

Context. Talk about the individuals and groups you worked with, and/or the environment in which you worked, to tackle a particular challenge (e.g., clients, co-workers, members of Congress, shrinking budget, low morale).

Action. Discuss the specific actions you took to address a challenge.  

Result. Give specific examples of the results of your actions.”

Here’s some more advice from OPM’s website for Federal jobs, www.usa.gov:  Focus on outcomes, the whats, the hows and the breadth and scope of your experience.

What occurred: Did you improve the workplace? Perhaps you refined technology tools, created programs, or organized procedures.  Regardless, let the agency know what occurred. Use brief examples to best illustrate your point whenever possible.

How much and how many. Did you start new projects? How many? Did you save your previous office money? Time? How much? Don't forget percentages, numbers, and degrees that apply.

Use numbers to highlight your accomplishments. Don't say, "wrote articles."  Instead, say, "wrote 25 articles in a three week period under daily deadlines."

The most important thing to remember is the reliance of Federal agencies on “key words” to screen potential candidates.   Here’s what the Federal Office of Personnel Management says: “You could be the most qualified person for the position, but you could be lost in a sea of applicants without the right keywords.”

Be forewarned: this is time consuming, but worth the effort.  You will be able to:

•       Identify and quantify your strengths
•       Highlight your accomplishments
•       Determine whether you are qualified for a particular job.

In the next post in this series, I will discuss how to organize all this information into a resume and begin the process of identifying whether you are qualified for certain Federal jobs.  Readers willing to provide examples of skills or accomplishments for (anonymous) discussion in the next post will receive a free resume review.