Keep A Work Log to Help Grow Your Career

Hello reader, are you keeping a log of significant events that occur while you are working? Maintaining a work log can be incredibly helpful - especially when it’s time for performance reviews, seeking a promotion, or preparing for interviews. If you’ve had a long career it becomes even more valuable! A well maintained work log helps you recall events in detail, which is crucial when you need to talk about those events with someone, e.g. as part of a promotion discussion or interview scenario.

For example it’s a great resource to review before an interview to help answer questions such as “Describe a project you’re particularly proud of. What was your role and what was the outcome?” or “Give me an example of a time you had a disagreement with a colleague. How did you resolve it?”.

So how should you write a work log to ensure that you get the most benefit from it when it counts? Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that I think a great work log needs to have to be useful:

• The work log needs to be saved to a personal account or storage
  • Especially if you want to be able to refer to the log when preparing for interviews! It’s not very useful if the content from previous roles is no longer available…
  • This does mean that the log will need to detail things in very general terms to avoid running afoul of company policies around confidentiality
• Make sure the work log is dated.
• Make sure to include the outcomes where possible, especially if the outcomes are measurable in some way.
  • These events are especially useful during performance reviews, promotion considerations and interviews.
  • Think about the STAR model when adding information - Situation, Task, Action and Result
• Ensure that the interactions between colleagues and yourself are added in detail. Questions about how you interact with others will often come up in performance reviews and interviews.
• Log the smaller events in addition to the larger ones. For example helping a colleague improve a little during a code review. A series of small events can make a compelling story
• Make sure that any disagreements or challenging discussions are logged in detail. These “negative” events are great opportunities for development and are especially valuable to talk about during interviews.
• Include contextual events like a new colleague joining your team, product launch dates, new CTO, new manager, change in work routine, new company etc. These help frame your work log and provide a natural way to group events.

As is often the case with these things, in hindsight I wish I had created and maintained a detailed work log for my whole career. It would have made performance reviews less stressful and job hunting a lot more enjoyable. Learn from my regret and start a work log today!