If you’re angling for a promotion or a new job, the best way to showcase your accomplishments and make a case for your worth is by writing a brag sheet.
“Brag sheet?” cry you. “But I am a mindful, demure, and humble team player! How could I ever do anything so gauche and uncouth as bragging??? That would make me appear pompous, full of myself, unworthy of respect or further responsibilities! Why, I would rather languish in an underpaid and overworked position for eternity than to so debase myself by bragging!”
Yes, the operative word in “brag sheet” has a negative connotation. And as much as we all admire humility, when it comes to getting ahead in this cutthroat capitalist job market, you need to banish the idea of humility from your mind. Humble people toil away in obscurity. Braggarts get promotions.
Which is why today we’re going to talk about how to effectively brag your way to the top… with a brag sheet!
What’s a brag sheet?
We’ve written before about how waiting around for a promotion at work just, uh… doesn’t work. And frankly, fabulous job opportunities generally don’t land in one’s lap either. If you’ve got upwardly mobile ambitions for your career, you usually need to work very hard at it. Here’s some of what we’ve already written about how to do that:
- A Millennial’s Guide to Growing Your Salary
- You Need Really Need To Ask for a Raise. Here’s How.
- Santa Isn’t Coming and Neither Is Your Promotion: How To Get Promoted
- How I Chessmastered Myself Into a Promotion at Work
- Job Hopping vs. Career Loyalty by the Numbers
- The Fascinating Results of Our Job Hopping vs. Career Loyalty Poll
… Unless you’re the scion of a generationally wealthy family, in which case, ignore all of our advice! You’ll have much better luck just asking your dad for a job. While you’re making seven figures in your mid-twenties you’ll wonder why nobody cool wants to be your friend. But I’m sure that’s a small price to pay for [checks notes] contributing to the economic and class disparity that is slowly killing our planet and consigning millions to lives of abject misery.
The tl;dr of it all is that if you want a raise, a promotion, or a new job, you need to put blinking neon lights all around your work accomplishments and hire a gospel choir to sing your praises everywhere you go in the job market.
This is where a brag sheet comes in.
It’s literally just a document that lists your work accomplishments. (Which is way more practical than hiring a choir and commissioning neon signs, to be honest.)
Your brag sheet is also a way to build a narrative around your time at the company. In fact, tech writer Will Larson actually refers to the concept as a “career narrative.”
Did the CEO at the last quarterly meeting outline three company-wide goals? Great! Arrange your brags according to those goals. Did you come into the company with an aim to master a particular skill? Perfect. State that goal on your brag sheet and outline three steps you took along the way to skill mastery.
At its core, your brag sheet should not only justify your continued employment (“I actually did shit, I didn’t just take up space”), but it should be a testament to your growth, accomplishments, and steadily increasing value as a worker (“You’d be lost without me and here’s why.”)
Why do you even need a brag sheet?
Quick: what did you have for lunch on March 6th? Can’t remember? That’s ok, it’s not that important.
Now, what did you do at work back in March? What projects did you start, work on, or complete? Which clients did you talk to? Who did you email? What research did you do? What did you create?
If you don’t remember these things off the top of your head, your boss won’t either. And the last thing you want when angling for career advancement is for the person holding the keys to that advancement to struggle when thinking of your work performance.
When it comes time to advocate for you with the people handing out raises, promotions, and industry awards, they’re going to need all this information: the projects you’ve completed, the clients you onboarded, the money you brought in, the widgets you personally built.
Thus, the brag sheet: a handy list to remind you, your boss, and everybody with the power to improve your fortunes that you get shit done.
Done right, a brag sheet will open doors for you throughout your career.
How to write a brag sheet
Some of you are already checked out and off to write your brag sheets. Good on you, my ambitious little lambs! Take the idea and run!
But for my precious pedants, here are a few guidelines to getting started.
1. It’s a living document
The easiest way to write a brag sheet is definitely not all at once. It should be something you work on regularly, almost like a diary. Personally, I contribute to my brag sheet at the end of every work week, adding a few bullet points at a time to summarize that week’s accomplishments.
Every couple of months I review earlier entries in the brag sheet, whittling down my bullet points to the most important or impressive, combining items, and shaping the narrative. When it’s time to use my brag sheet to get a coveted raise, promotion, or award, I should only have to revise the last little bit.
2. It takes a village
While the intention of a brag sheet is to make you stand out above the competition, it need not be a lonely or secretive endeavor! Get your coworkers in on it! End every work week with a brief group brag sheet writing session.
Other people see you differently from how you see yourself. And if you’re anything like me (read: plagued with crippling imposter syndrome), your coworkers are probably even more aware of your brag-worthy accomplishments than you are. So call out others’ accomplishments and they’ll do the same for you. It’s a lot easier to compliment others than to brag on yourself, so let your coworkers hype you up and add it to your brag sheet.
3. Focus on incremental accomplishments
Most big and brag-worthy work projects take a long time and many smaller steps to complete. Each of those smaller steps is an accomplishment worth calling out on your brag sheet. Remember: you can (and will) revise it later to condense those steps into one big milestone if necessary.
4. Organize by goals
Though I just suggested thinking of your brag sheet like a diary while you’re writing it, it shouldn’t stay in diary format. A chronological litany of brags will be easy to write, but not the most effective when stating your case for promotion.
When you’re applying to a job, it helps to include keywords from the job description in your resume and cover letter. Think of your brag sheet as your in-house resume and your company’s mission statement or annual list of goals as the job description. Organizing the brag sheet around that mission statement or list of goals will show that you’re not only on board with the company’s plan, but taking concrete steps to make it happen.
Julia Evans’s excellent advice on brag sheets has some great ideas for organization in her brag sheet template.
5. A picture is worth a whole buncha words
We love a good graph! Especially if the line is going up and to the right.
Feel free to include screenshots, charts, photos, and other visual aids in your brag sheet. Depending on your industry, a blueprint for a finished product, a photo of smiling and happy clients, or a graph of increasing revenue over time could speak volumes about your talent and skill.
When and how to use a brag sheet
If you’ve been faithfully building up your brag sheet over time, then when your moment comes you should be ready to grab it with both hands and shake it into submission like an unruly toddler. (That is what you do with toddlers, right? Shake them? For some reason that doesn’t sound right…)
The right opportunity might take the form of…
- Your annual employee performance review: Bring your brag sheet to the meeting or email it to your boss beforehand. When your boss asks you to summarize your accomplishments, you’ve got it all right there, baby.
- The retirement or departure of a more senior staff member: This is one of the most frequent opportunities for internal promotion. When you apply for their old job, you can use your brag sheet to shape your application and practice what to say in the job interview. It worked for me!
- Your dream job gets posted: See above. You should turn to your brag sheet to inform you on what to include in the job application.
- Submissions open for a prestigious industry award: Some industries don’t do awards. But for those that do, you generally need to submit some materials for consideration. And what they’re looking for is literally your brag sheet.
- You get put on probation: If your supervisor thinks you’re underperforming at work, you might get put on a performance improvement plan (PIP). It can be incredibly daunting to work under the threat of getting fired. But regularly sharing brag sheet updates with your supervisor while you’re on probation is a good way to convince them of your usefulness. With any luck, it’ll save your ass.
What to do if you have nothing to brag about
Let’s say you don’t think you have anything to brag about on your brag sheet. This is patently false, by the way, which you’d know if you had been writing your brag sheet all along. But still—let’s say you genuinely can’t think of anything to put on your brag sheet.
It’s here that we turn to the ancient and Bitch-endorsed art of reframing.
We first explained how reframing works when it comes to writing your resume. But for those who need a refresher, reframing is the subtle art of describing a fact from a more favorable point of view.
For example, if you have a big gap on your resume because you stayed home to take care of an ailing family member… no you don’t! Instead, you were a professional caregiver during that time, fostering wellness in the patient through daily administration of healthcare, companionship, and enrichment activities.
Thus also with your brag sheet.
You didn’t simply perform the tasks in your job description. You contributed to the department’s bottom line by maximizing daily output, maintained consistency across all deliverables, and developed a new process to streamline the department’s daily workflow! Throw in a bar graph of the department’s monthly revenue and you’re halfway done.
The more you reframe, the easier it’ll become to recognize the brag-worthy accomplishments from your daily work. This isn’t about lying (which our lawyer informs us we do not recommend under any circumstances). It’s about understanding the full value you bring to your job every single day.
See what I just did there?
My darling little badasses, do you have a brag sheet you use for your work? I’d love to read it so I can expound upon your brilliance! You are cordially invited to share any part of your brag sheets in the comments section.
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