Team Projects

This is so good — no great — that I’m going to make it a permanent page, not just a post on the resume discussion blog.

How many of you have filled your resume with things like “I did this,” I was responsible for sales of X, or “I produced these projects”?  A lot of people do that.  It shows how much they’ve accomplished individually.  But it doesn’t show what they’ve done as a team.

After looking at a lot of resumes and interviewing a lot of potential hires, you start to notice the difference.  A resume that tells about the person and not the team shows that the person views a job as just that, a job to be individually completed, not as a job to be completed as part of a team or a job to be completed in the service of a larger goal.  And that is the perspective of someone who hasn’t yet learned the importance of working within a team.  That is the perspective of a person who is an employee and not a potential team leader.

How do successful leaders respond when someone congratulates them on a good job?  They start talking about the great team they’ve got working for them.  How this person or that person stepped up in the effort.  Or how everyone really came together to pull through.  Why?  Because they know what it takes to succeed.  It takes a team.

Nobody works in isolation.  Your resume is built on projects you’ve completed and successes you’ve been a part of.  Any good manager knows that from experience.  Don’t downgrade your own contributions but rather than working solely to build a list of your own accomplishments, create a list of the larger accomplishments your efforts helped to build.  Build the team you’re on and you build your resume. (Emphasis Added!)