📣 Speaking of...do you know your career story?
Part 2 of 4: Inside look into the 12 Week Career Launch, designed to land you a new job in tech in 12 weeks
A couple years ago I ran into a neighbor who turned out to work at a startup. He introduced me to the CTO, which led to a full time offer for my very first Product Management job. A job I spent 5 years looking for!
Five years of looking for a role I was 100% confident I could do, but could not get interviews for because I did not know how to tell my career story. So all those years… I was passed on for Product roles because I did not sound like a Product Manager and I did not know how to communicate my work experience through the lens of a Product Manager. 🤷🏻♀️
When you learn to tell your career story….new opportunities appear!
12 Week Career Launch is an 12 week program for career transformation. Land your first job in tech in 12 weeks or less.
In Part 1 of the series, we talked about creating your new professional identity. Part 2 is all about communicating that identity through your career story.
What is a career story?
The career story is how you introduce yourself to the hiring team. It can also be called your Pitch or your Intro. Usually, the career story is a brief introduction of who you are through your resume and first interview. Anytime some asks you: Tell me about yourself…you are telling them your career story.
It consists of a narrative that ties together:
WHO you are (professionally)
WHY you are interested in the role
WHAT you can bring to the role.
Like in any story there is a beginning, middle and end.
Here’s an example of a career story by a Software Engineer bootcamp grad:
For 10 years I worked in education. I grew tired of the endless work and lack of work life balance. A good friend of mine, a software engineer, suggested I try coding in case I find it interesting. Once I tried coding, I loved the satisfaction of working out challenging technical problems. Earlier this year, I completed a bootcamp for full stack engineering. Now I am looking to combine my passion for helping others learn with taking on new technical challenges on an engineering team.
Your career story combines your new professional identity + your previous career that highlights transferable skills and provides a clear narrative around WHY you are switching careers. Humans are curious and always wonder WHY someone chose to make a change - why not use this natural curiosity to create a narrative you can control and use to your benefit.
Why does your career story matter?
The career story matters because it sets the foundation for the hiring process. It’s a way to stand out among the other candidates + setup the conversation for your benefit.
Most candidates rely on the hiring team to ask questions to get to know them best, yet that method can result in missed opportunities. Only YOU know what you bring to the role, so if you don’t speak to the most relevant experiences, the hiring manager might not know to ask!
Telling your career story helps you focus the interview conversations so you can talk about the experiences that matter the most, while providing context around your approach to learning new skills. By developing and presenting your career story, you increase the chances of making real connections with the hiring team and standing out during the interview.
You can also use your career story as an anchor to how you present your work experiences. That means you can refer back to it to tie your interview answers together, or to refer to a previous job when you want to bring up transferable skills.
Your career story can show up on your resume, interview conversations, portfolio, Linked and more. By creating a story that starts from your initial pitch and continues in your answers to interview questions, you help the hiring manager piece together your skills, experiences and assess if they are a match for the position.
Know your audience
When you go through the hiring process, you’ll meet multiple people from different teams. The recruiter is looking for slightly different level of information than the hiring manager than the peer within the team.
You’ll want to customize your career story during these times:
Each person will ask ask you to introduce yourself, so learn to slightly customize your introduction when relevant to bring the right topics to the conversation
Depending on the roles and person type, you may be asked specific questions about how your potential new role interacts with their role (ex. How does a Product Manager interacts with developer) Learn to actively listen to what each person is trying to learn about you, every interviewer is interested in a slightly different part of your background.
Depending on the arrangement of the interview (ex. 30 min panel interview with 3 people vs 40min call with 1 person) you’ll be faced with multiple kinds of people at once. If this happens, have your top answers ready to go, while checking in with each person to see if they want more details from their angle (ex. developer vs designer vs growth operations, etc).
To recap, creating a career story will provide:
A clear picture of who you are and what you’re looking for professionally
A pitch to quickly communicate who you are and how your experiences are relevant to a specific role
An opportunity to showcase your domain knowledge, values or relevant interests
Communicating your career story is Part 2 of 4 of the series that takes you inside the 12 Week Career Launch. Next up is Part 3: Uncovering career opportunities
12 Week Career Launch is a program created to support people in tech to enter and stay in the tech industry in technical and non-technical roles. It’s designed specifically for motivated career changers to land a job in tech in 12 weeks or less. 🪴
Learn more about this course by reading all the details below👇🏼
So important to have a narrative around how you arrived where you are!