The Art of Promoting Yourself without Bragging

As a leading career coach, I’m seeing that a lot of clients have one common challenge:  talking about themselves!

Talking about yourself can be one of the most difficult challenges in making a career change.  More specifically, How can you talk about yourself in your networking opportunities, interviews and to hiring managers without sounding like you’re bragging?

The fact is, people aren’t going to know what a superstar you are unless you tell them!  I use to be intimidated by this, too, until I learned some pretty important lessons.   So too help you in your career change, here are three (3) of my networking strategies critical to your success…

1. Talk about your projects, teams, and the value they delivered to the organization.

It may feel uncomfortable talking about your achievements, but the fact is you won’t get noticed (yet alone hired!) if you don’t talk about them!  Here’s a tip – focus on the projects and teams you contributed to, and the value they delivered to the organization. Talk about goals, or stretch goals, that were met and how they benefited the organization to help increase revenue, save costs, or gain more market share.

2. Focus on results.

Many career changers make the mistake of focusing on their previous responsibilities they’ve had in past jobs.  What I want you to do is talk about the results you’ve helped achieve on your projects, programs and teams. All programs are measured in terms of success metrics (or else they wouldn’t get funded) so if you don’t know the results – go back and ask the project managers or department managers.

Here’s a bonus tip…

To add even more credibility and stand out from your competition, I want you to quantify your achievements with a number, dollar, or percentage. For example, instead of saying that you managed a sales team for a specific product, instead, say that you led a team of 5 sales professionals who increased sales by 15% and generated $250,000 a year for the past 3 years!  Quantifying your successes says that you are a driver, high achiever, and that you get results.

3. Attitude is the key ingredient!

I’ve found that getting a new job really boils down to two things: confidence and passion.  To get the job at the NBC-TV station in Monterey and beat out the other 100 job candidates, I was passionate about the company AND the position.  Even though I didn’t have the kind of experience that was required, I told the hiring manager that I absolutely knew that I could do the job.

There’s a kind of quiet confidence that we all have down deep inside.  A confidence that comes from knowing what we’re capable of doing.  When you transition into a new job role or a new company, you need to show the hiring manager that you have confidence in yourself and know that you’ll be successful in the job.

And finally…