What would you consider your greatest accomplishment?
Some achievements have practical universal application but these accomplishments are often limited. Most, however, are limited to specific areas of human endeavour.
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Therefore, what one person, professional group or an entire industry may consider a ground breaking achievement may not necessarily be seen and evaluated as such by industries and players for whom such achievements mean very little, if any at all.
The achievements of a jobseeker is of important to the job giver because there is evidence, even if scanty and uncorroborated, pointing to a certain fact worth considering by the employer. Persons with high achievements ratios often start proving this early in their life or formation.
That being the case, your prospective employer, if (s)he is not looking for an unambitious person, would wish to listen to you as you tell the story of your achievements, however, little they may seem.
Achievements can be grouped into two general categories: academic and non-academic accomplishments.
Academic accomplishments
In the United Kingdom, striking performance at the Advanced Level examinations has been considered a good predictor of future performance of job seekers.
In our part of the world, while the Senior Secondly School Certificate Examinations results may not be such a good predictor, the school the job seeker attended is often used as a criterion for selection. Biased and unfair as this may be, very little can be done about it.
If you attended an underprivileged, small community school in a remote part of the country where the best grades do not even merit the attention of second tier schools, one of your achievements will be your ability to have attained marks at the junior level examinations which paved the way for you to attend a school with the clout of the likes of Legon Presec, and Achimota College, among others.
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If from this school you joined the nation’s talented to do a degree in business, law, economics, engineering or any field of your interest and again stepped out of the crowd with a distinction, these are the accomplishments you must brandish under academic accomplishments.
If you represented your school, district or even the region for a prestigious competition such as the Maths and Science Quiz, you wait for nothing to list these achievements. If you did an academic project that attracted the attention of the faculty and subsequently the business community in the region, such achievements are worth the attention of the job giver, no matter the capacity in which the employer wishes to hire you.
If you succeeded in becoming a teaching assistant in the faculty or college from which you just graduated, this will be regarded as an accomplishment of no mean status even if you are attending an interview where such academic credentials have no direct bearing on the outcome of the screening.
Some job seekers have won academic prizes ever. Even if not so popular with the country as a whole, it will be acceptable to mention this award and perfectly situate it in the right context. Scholarships, even if in parts, are achievements that easily presuppose that you may replicate feats such as the ones you are listing when afforded the opportunity.
Extra curricula accomplishment?
Achievements in sports, drama, student level leadership roles and other non-academic feats are sometimes worthy of the attention of the interviewer. Even though not all accomplishments in this category may be relevant to the role for which you are being vetted, those relevant must be enumerated.
Rising to lead the university or hall level football team or to captain the basketball team of the entire university might not be the kind of achievement that sets the heart of the job giver throbbing. But when you combine a strenuous activity like leading your college team and finishing off with a second class upper division honours or better, the intelligent interviewer will find in you the man or woman with the formation appropriate to fit into the chaos sometimes generated by the corporate environment.
Professional achievements
For the job seeker in employment but seeking better and more challenging environment to fit into, it will be better for you to draw on your achievements from this field.
The employer may have reservations about the academic accomplishments of a fresh from school job seeker but without any professional experience, this job giver has will have to rely on such school related achievements in order to arrive at a decision.
But for the job seeker in transition, even though sterling academic laurels may be of some appeal, the real game changer accomplishment will have to come from industry.
Without an enviable profession-based story to infer from, you are likely to hit your toe against hard luck. You may leave your prospective employer wondering if your school related achievements are translatable in the industry.
And when you cast even the thinnest layer of doubt around the mind of the employer, you leave her with the difficulty of not knowing whether to cast the vote in your favour or otherwise. And a betting this uncertainty often ends up not catering for your interest.
Companies are aggressively sinking money in search of achievers. Because the spirit of achievement isn’t easily written on a job seeker’s forehead, a method must be evolved for figuring this out. Of the many such methods, asking jobseeker to tell their own stories of sterling accomplishments has proved worth the while.
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When you are preparing for a job interview, make time to catalogue your achievements. Mean as some of them may be to you, they may not be seen and evaluated as such in the eyes of the HR.