Text guides

Career development

Keep a record of your work and prepare for useful conversations about it. Use examples, clear requests and agreed next steps.

12 practical tasks. Each guide includes a sample request and a way to check the answer.

Keep a work accomplishment log with evidenceWrite an entry when a useful piece of work finishes. Record the problem, your contribution and what changed, with a link to supporting material you may retain. Include collaborators so you can later explain which part of a shared result was yours.
Organize evidence for a performance reviewUse the criteria in your employer's review form to organize examples from your work. Give each criterion a separate entry, link the strongest evidence and record any missing detail. Check the review period before choosing a result from an older project.
Write a self-review from specific examplesBuild each paragraph around an example you can explain: what you did, what happened and what remained unresolved. Use your employer's criteria to choose the examples. A difficult project can belong in the review when you describe the difficulty and your response accurately.
Prepare a one-to-one agenda that needs a conversationChoose the matters you want to discuss with your manager, such as a decision that is blocked or feedback on recent work. Give each item enough context to explain the request. Put the most time-sensitive question first and note any preparation the conversation needs.
Prepare a brief for a mentoring conversationChoose a current problem and give your mentor enough context to discuss it. Describe what you tried and what happened, then state the question you want help with. Keep background that changes the answer and leave unrelated career history for another conversation.
Make a skill plan from role criteriaTake the skills from the role description and record evidence of what you can already do. Where that evidence leaves a gap, choose a practice task that resembles the work and define how to check it. Keep required qualifications visible as separate requirements.
Ask to shadow a colleague with a clear purposeA good shadowing request names one skill you want to see in practice, offers a small block of time and says what you will not need. Your colleague can judge the cost quickly and answer without designing the session for you.
Turn a repeated work task into cross-training notesCross-training notes cover four things: what starts the task, what must be in place first, the steps in order and the exceptions that break the usual path. Add a contact for cases the notes do not cover.
Plan what to learn at a work conferenceStart with two or three questions from your current work that a conference might help answer, then choose sessions that address them. Note schedule conflicts early, and decide before you go what you will share or try afterward.
Write a small internal project proposalA small proposal states the problem with whatever evidence you have, suggests an experiment that is easy to stop, names who will run it and says how success will be judged. Leave out savings you cannot support.
Introduce your work to a new teamTell the new team what your group does in a sentence or two, what you depend on from them, what they can expect from you and who to contact for each. Skip the organizational history unless it changes how they work with you.
Make a knowledge index before changing rolesBuild a simple list of the documents and systems your role depends on, with a purpose, an owner, a current status and a way to request access. Add the open items and anything you know that is not written down anywhere.

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