Take Your Career to the Next Level 🚀

About 69% of women in the study would rather minimize their successes than tell others about them. According to The Self- Promotion Gap, the majority of women avoid talking about their strengths and accomplishments, and I’m guilty of doing the same.

My team and manager didn’t understand why I was stressed all the time. Little did they know, I was juggling my daily responsibilities of data analysis, editing presentations, chasing people for deliverables, and on top of that I was working on 2 projects outside of my team, volunteering outside of work with two organizations, managing grad school, and chores at home.

All of this was somehow brought up during a 1-on-1 meeting with my manager and he was shocked. He had no idea. We were able to create a plan together to prioritize my deliverables to make everything more balanced. After the meeting, my manager said something that seemed intuitive but I had overlooked it, and it’s stuck with me since:

I won’t know what you’re doing unless you tell me.

I had avoided mentioning anything because I didn’t want to sound like I was bragging or complaining , but in doing so I was stalling my career growth and new opportunities by keeping my manager in the dark. Like many fellow early in career colleagues, career growth (through promotions, pay increases, or new projects) is an important early goal we set for ourselves, yet sometimes it seems impossible to get to that next step.

After hearing various female managers and leaders at Cisco speak on the subject of career growth, they shared similar advice:

Get Visibility by Highlighting Your Accomplishments

As with anything, it takes practice to get used to it and to get good at it, but here are some ways you can start highlighting your accomplishments:

1. Do a self- analysis and ask yourself:

• What are my greatest strengths?
• What are my greatest weaknesses or improvement areas?
• When people think of me, what do I want others to associate with me? (aka what does my personal brand look like?)
• Update your elevator pitch, employee profiles, email signatures, business cards, bios, LinkedIn/ Social Media Profiles to reflect your strengths, personal brand, and untapped potential
• Update a key leader or stakeholder on your progress towards a goal
• Send regular updates and status reports to a distribution list of people who would appreciate being kept up to date on what you’re doing

2. Create a presentation on best practices to share with other teams

3. Contribute to an article, blog post, LinkedIn post, industry publication

4. Ask well-thought out questions at a meeting that shows what you know

5. Ask for a spot on a meeting agenda, to share updates, knowledge, lessons learned

6. Start a meeting by asking each individual to share a recent accomplishment or best practices OR give kudos to other people and their accomplishments