Add a Career Impact Matrix℠ to Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is quickly becoming the leading career search engine of choice for job seekers of every skill and experience level. LinkedIn’s late 2012-upgrade now enables job seekers to display rich content on their profile by linking and launching rich media content (such as documents, videos, presentations, and more) displayed on the Summary, Experience, and Education sections of a profile.

Here is a powerful new tool for job seekers to add to leverage LinkedIn’s new rich content: a Career Impact Matrix℠ (CIM). The CIM goes way beyond the resume in its ability to clearly and concisely describe the impact you have delivered in your career. While a resume typically lists quantifiable accomplishments under each employer, the CIM focuses on a level of detail that more deeply quantifies and validates your achievements. Saved as a single page PDF, it becomes the perfect downloadable career search tool to differentiate your LinkedIn profile.

Creating the Career Impact Matrix. It is easy to create CIM in any word processing program that utilizes tables. First, establish your three or four most important career accomplishment categories. These are the areas in which you can demonstrate multiple successes that were quite impactful to the employers you served during your career. These topical categories form the vertical axis of the matrix.

The following four columns should appear across the top, horizontal axis of the table:

Make certain to embed keywords and key phrases in this document that are associated with your current and target career objectives.

Click here for an example of a Career Impact Matrix for a Senior Organizational Development Manager.

Career Impact Matrix for Experienced Workers. Experienced workers have likely delivered more (and more significant) accomplishments by virtue of more years as working adults. Consider your career as a whole. Note the example for John Smith, a senior manager involved in organizational development for multiple employers in his 23 year career. He has listed the combined results of similar projects and programs in two columns, Organizational Scope and Horizon Impact. In this way he is demonstrating both the longevity of repeated successes and the total measurable impact each has had.

Career Impact Matrix for Inexperienced Workers. Just because someone is inexperienced does not mean they cannot use a CIM to differentiate themselves from their competitors for positions of interest. By age 24 a person has accumulated six to eight years’ experience through summer and part-time jobs, internships, school activities, volunteer work, and class work. Bear in mind that a CIM is a tool that sizes for a person’s relative experiences. A 24-year old is likely competing with similarly experienced people, most of whom will never create a CIM for themselves. Thus one could argue that a CIM is more impactful for a less experienced worker! The key is to identify the top three or four areas in which impactful contributions have been made, where the impact can be described and quantified. Less experienced workers might want to consider a larger font and larger margins if quantifiable accomplishments are light.

Additional Uses for the Career Impact Matrix. In addition to embedding it on your LinkedIn and other professional profiles associated with your career search, it should be utilized as a final page of your resume and a clean copy printed out on resume paper and brought to job interviews. Make sure you place your contact information on the CIM in the event that it gets separated from your associated documents.

Is 2013 the year you incorporate a Career Impact Matrix into your career search activities?