Job Profile (Worksheet 3.4)

The first few chapters in 12 Steps to a New Career focus on helping you to identify your skills from different perspectives. In Chapter 2, you started with Worksheet 2.1 – Categories of Achievements, then you followed the guidelines in Worksheet 2.2 – Writing Achievement Stories. These were fundamental in helping you understand that what you did to achieve something created stories that demonstrated skills you already had or developed in the process of accomplishing something.

As you moved to Chapter 3, you have been looking for additional skills you might have overlooked using different perspectives, such as skills with tangibles, intangibles, and people (Worksheets 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3). In this exercise, you will be looking at your past jobs for two reasons:

1. You need to be able to describe the details of your past jobs so others will be able to understand the extent of your role and responsibilities. (Interviewers will ask you about this.)
2. You need to be sure you have considered all the skills you used or developed regardless of whether you want to use them again in your next opportunity. (This is important because sometimes a skill you developed in a particular environment and do not necessarily want to do again might be transferable to a different environment that appeals to you.)

Here is an example of what a Job Profile should contain:

Job title & Company
Controller – Middletown National Savings Bank

When did you hold this job? From & To (use mm/dd/yyyy)
From: 3/5/2008    To: 10/31/2014

What were your functional responsibilities?
— Managed 10-person accounting department, including all loan administration activities.
— Cash management and hedging of financial securities.
— Preparing loan portfolios for discounting and resale.
— Construction financing and disbursements management.
— Financial statement preparation and reporting.

What skills did you use or develop?
— Delegated tasks to team and monitored results.
— Trained and supervised subordinates.
— Analyzed financial accounts, construction loan applications and construction loan disbursement requests.
— Developed criteria for inclusion in loan portfolio reselling and negotiated transactions with other lenders.
— Analyzed cash requirements and hedging risks associated with foreign loan currencies.

What were your most important achievements or accomplishments in this job?
— Detected fraudulent construction loan activity involving an officer of the company which resulted in his termination and a return of over $300,000 in inappropriate and duplicate expenditures.
— Packaged a $750 million loan resale and negotiated its sale recognizing $5 million in profit, largest in the bank’s history.
— Designed a new construction loan processing procedure which reduced the time to approve construction loan disbursements by 25%, improved control over unauthorized expenditures, and reduced loan administration costs by over $300,000 annually.
— Earned the annual Chairman’s Award for Outstanding Service for the detection and resolution of a fraudulent activity.

Tip: Use a consistent format for all your past jobs. This helps you to think consistently for multiple positions and you can then quickly refer to them when you are networking with others whose help you want and when you are preparing for interviews.

Download a worksheet you can use to summarize your prior jobs following a consistent format: Worksheet 3.4 – Job Profile Template