Cite numerical figures!!!!!! Displaying Quantified Data, Accomplishments, skills, and specific identifications of names of products, services, clients (internal/external), customers and name specific or general technologies used to attain your quantified success!

Show your value (V), value means that your resume is a brochure of your accomplishments.

What value you brought to your role for the amount of time you were in it.

V = An idea, process that you created, helped support or make.

1. Reduced project cycle time (# of months, days, or years)

2. Saved $$

3. Made $$

4. Maintained business

5. Created Business

Level of Influence

1. # of managers, clients (internal/external), customer groups, projects you either supported or

managed.

Name Recognition:

1. Name & numeric value of project working on:

2. Name of clients or customers you worked with (Organizations) you worked with:

3. Basically were you a big fish in a small pond, or small fish in a big pond.

Tools & Training for Success

1. Information technologies you used and some how improved a process (primevera,

QuickBooks SAP, Oracel, MS access, excel, that allowed you to attain the (Value)

• Monetary budgets/funds saved - • Dollars ("... with sales topping $35,000 per month"),

• Time periods/efficiency improved - Time ("Turned a two-hour procedure into a 20-minute task"),

• Lines of code written/debugged,

• Numbers of machines administered/fixed, etc. which demonstrate progress or accomplishments due

directly to your work.

• People ("Managed or supported staff of 45 ..."),

• Products ("produced 140 widgets per hour"), and

• Anything else that you can think of to count.

• Performance-driven

• Goal-oriented

• Time-defined

• Measurable

• Initiative-based

• Action-backed

• What did you do to help make money for the organization?

• Were you responsible for saving the organization money?

Well, let's say that when you started your job, it consistently took you about 30 seconds to file each folder. After you came up with a more sensible filing system, it took you only about 10

seconds, meaning it took you 20 seconds less for each file. Twenty seconds is two-thirds of the original 30-second figure, which your calculator will tell you is a bit over the nice round number of .65, or 65%. So that's what you shaved off the filing time.

If I were reading job applicants' resumes and saw the following lines on two different resumes, which one would get your attention faster?

Created an incentive program to reduce absenteeism.

Created and implemented an incentive program reducing absenteeism by 20% in less than 3 months.

Do you see the difference? The second statement is definable (quantified), easy to understand, and relates the skills and determination to achieve such results. It is much more impressive to read.

The first example TOLD the employer what was accomplished.

The second example SHOWED the employer what was accomplished.

There is a big difference in how someone relates to those two sentences.

Examples of Quant’s

HR Quant: In human resources planning, give the project quantifiable metrics. Project success metrics need to be concrete measures like improved scores on employee surveys, improved productivity or "dollars and cents" measures like reduced costs or improved return on investment.

Accountants Quant: Accountants quantify everything with numbers so you would think that they would do the same with their resume. So if you haven’t done so already, quantify your achievements. Put numbers around how much money you have saved the company, the amount by which you have improved cash flow, the performance measures of your department.

For example: An accountant has streamlined procedures, realizing a $2,500 monthly savings for his company. A dollar figure quantifies the accomplishment, while noting "streamlined procedures" explains how he did it. If he achieved those savings within three months of hire, it might be written this way:

Achieved a $2,500 monthly savings for XYZ Company within three months of hire by streamlining procedures.

Imagine the hiring manager’s reaction to the above, as opposed to this entry: “Streamlined procedures for XYZ Company.” Doesn’t say much, does it?

Engineering is often known as the applied science. As such, engineers are professionals whose work revolves around applying science to create products and solve problems. Therefore make sure that you list the skills on your engineering resume. In sure that you list core engineer competencies such as being a practical problem solver, pragmatic thinker, and don’t forget creativity. Often times engineers stress being practical at the expense of highlighting their creativity. An engineer who is a creative problem solver is invaluable to an employer.

Of course talk is cheap and just listing words such as practical problem solver, creative problem solver, etc. is empty. The key here is to include specific accomplishments or work outcomes to support your engineering resume. So for example suppose you are mechanical engineer. Not only do you including your resume profile that you’re a creative problem solver, but in your resume you mention how you developed and implemented new ways to troubleshoot and install equipment to reduce turnaround by 30%.

What really separates a good engineer from a great engineer? A good engineer has all the basic required technical skills and abilities. These are the fundamental competencies that they developed in engineering school. The great engineers possess not only these core engineering skills but also strong soft skills. Great engineers are not only practical and pragmatic but they are also strong communicators, leaders with excellent interpersonal skills. A great engineer resume tips is to ensure that you include the soft skills. Again list the skills but also include specific quantifiable accomplishments that support your assertion.

You may be thinking what kind of career accomplishment can you use to support the fact that you have strong interpersonal skills, or great leadership skills? Be creative and ask yourself what are the observable all comes of having strong leadership and interpersonal skills? So for example you may use social proof to support your interpersonal skills. For example you may insert a testimonial from a client or you may insert a statement from a recommendation letter written by your boss at the top of your resume. Likewise you may like to include some of accomplishments that sure direct reports achieve under your leadership. For example you may have led in engineering team that reduced production time by 20%. The idea here create an image, lace your engineer resume with evidence that will leave the employer to form a certain impression.

Always think of ways to separate and distinguish your engineering resume from the others. There are many many ways that you can do this and understood a rival office he offered top of my head to show you some of the possibilities.

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• Number of customer needs identified

• Number of discrete requirements identified (overall system and by subsystem)

• Number of requirements/specification changes (cumulative or per unit of time)

• Requirements creep (new requirements / total number of requirements)

• Requirements change rate (requirements changes accepted / total number of requirements)

• Percent of requirement deficiencies at qualification testing

• Number of to-be-determined (TBD) requirements / total requirements

• Verification percentage (number of requirements verified / total number of requirements)

• Number of design review changes / total terminations or connections

• Number of post-design release changes / total terminations or connections

• Percent fault coverage or number of faults detectable / total number of possible faults

• Percent fault isolation

• Percent hand assembled parts

• Transistors or gates designed per engineering man-month

• Number of prototype iterations

• First silicon success rate

• Number of in-process design changes / number of parts

• Number of design review deficiencies / number of parts

• Number of drafting errors / number of sheets or # of print changes / total print features

• Drawing growth (unplanned drawings / total planned drawings)

• Producibility rating or assembly efficiency

• Number of prototype iterations

• Percent of parts modeled in solids

Project Management Quant: is a definite asset in engineering, because often time’s senior engineers lead large and complex projects. Include any courses and training that you may have had related to project management. So if you have a PM designation or certificate, make sure you include this. If you don’t have a formal certification that in project management you may want to consider getting this for leadership roles. If you have lead large and complex projects make sure you specify the size and scope and complexity for the reader. Make sure you do this in a brief matter, do not have shot all the details of the project on your resume. Remember this is the resume not a project document. One simple way to do this is to indicate the dollar amount of the project, the number of people involved in the project under your leadership, and the size of the employer.

Include intangible costs' but don't start with them.'

Add these intangibles in as additional benefits or costs associated with core HR projects like reducing turnover, reducing stress, increasing morale and halting the loss of knowledge capital.

Compare the overall cost of the project to the returns.

Keep in mind, nobody would ever go out and borrow against your credit card at 18 percent interest rate and put that money in a passbook savings account at 1% interest. Yet, that's what we ask our companies to do if we don't provide a sufficient financial benefit to them compared to the cost of the project.

Know the categories. There are three categories of quantifiable benefits in human resources planning.

Increase in profitability/revenue-If you can show that your initiative will have a positive impact on revenue, that's a very strong benefit for most companies.

A decrease in costs/expenses- If it reduces expenses in a particular category. If employees are more efficient, able to produce more, improve their skill sets or you're hiring the right people and they're able to do more with less. Those are specific revenue and cost decreases. Those are always the strongest. Cost or risk avoidance

A quantified Accomplishment should include dollar figures, percentages, and time periods.

• Manhours per 1,000 software lines of code (KSLOC)

• Manhours per function point

• Software problem reports (SPR's) before release per 1,000 software lines of code (KSLOC)

• SPR's after release per KSLOC

• Design review errors per KSLOC

• Code review errors per KSLOC

• Number of software defects per week

• SPR fix response time

• Actual MTBF / predicted MTBF

• Percent of build-to-packages released without errors

• Percent of testable requirements

• Process capability (Cp or Cpk)

• Product yield

• Field failure rate

• Design review cycle time

• Open action items

• System availability

• Percent of parts with no engineering change orders

• Number of suppliers

• Parts per supplier (number of parts / number of suppliers )

• % of standard or preferred parts

• % of certified suppliers

• Percent of suppliers engaged in collaborative design

• Breakeven time or time-to-profitability

• Development cycle time trend (normalized to program complexity)

• Current year percent of revenue from products developed in the last "X" years (where "X" is

typically the normal development cycle time or the average product life cycle period)

• Percent of products capturing 50% or more of the market

• Percent of R&D expense as a percent of revenue

• Average engineering change cycle time

• Proposal win rate

• Total patents filed/pending/awarded per year

• R&D headcount and percent increase/decrease in R&D headcount

• Number of approved projects ongoing

• Development work-in-progress (the non-recurring, cumulative investment in approved

development projects including internal labor and overhead and external development

expenditures and capital investment, e.g., tooling, prototypes, etc.)

• Development turnover (annual sales divided by annual average development work-in-

progress)

• Pipeline throughput rate

• New products completed/released to production last 12 months

• Cancelled projects and/or wasted spending last 12 months

• Percent R&D resources/investment devoted to new products (versus total of new products

plus sustaining and administrative)

• Portfolio balance by project/development type (percent of each type of project: new

platform/new market, new product, product upgrade, etc.)

• Percent of projects approved at each gate review

• Number of ideas/proposed products in the pipeline or the investigation stage (prior to

formal approval)

• Balanced team scorecard

• Percent project personnel receiving team building/team launch training/facilitation

• Average training hours per person per year or % of payroll cost for training annually

• IPT/PDT turnover rate or average IPT/PDT turnover rate

• Percent core team members physically collocated

• Staffing ratios (ratio of each discipline's headcount on project to number of design

engineers)

• Actual staffing (hours or headcount) vs. plan

• Personnel turnover rate

• % of milestone dates met

• Schedule performance

• Personnel ratios

• Cost performance

• Milestone or task completion vs. plan

• On-schedule task start rate

• Phase cycle time vs. plan

• Time-to-market or time-to-volume

• Unit production cost / target cost

• Labor hours or labor hours / target labor hours

• Material cost or material cost / target material cost

• Product performance or product performance / target product performance or technical

performance measures (e.g., power output, mileage, weight, power consumption, mileage,

range, payload, sensitivity, noise, CPU frequency, etc.)

• Mean time between failures (MTBF)

• Mean time to repair (MTTR)

• System availability

• Number of parts or number of parts / number of parts for last generation product

• Defects per million opportunities or per unit

• Production yield

• Field failure rates or failure rates per unit of time or hours of operation

• Engineering changes after release by time period

• Design/build/test iterations

• Production ramp-up time (example)

• Product ship date vs. announced ship date or planned ship date

• Product general availability (GA) date vs. announced GA date or planned GA date

• % of parts or part characteristics analyzed/simulated

• Net present value of cash outflows for development and commercialization and the

inflows from sales

• Breakeven time (see above)

• Expected commercial value (This equals the net present value of product cash flows

multiplied by the probability of commercial success minus the commercialization cost.

This is multiplied by the probability of technical success minus the development costs)

• Percent of parts that can be recycled

• Percent of parts used in multiple products

• Average number of components per product

• Percent team members with full access to product data and product models

• CAD workstation ratio (CAD workstations / number of team members)

• Analysis/simulation intensity (analysis/simulation runs per model)

• Percent of team members with video-conferencing/desktop collaboration access/tools

Six Sigma is a business initiative first introduced by Motorola in early 1990s. Recent Six Sigma success stories come from companies like General Electric, Allied Signal, Sony etc. According to GE's 1997 annual report, Six Sigma initiatives contributed more than 300 million US Dollars !

In general, Six Sigma implementation involves the following SEVEN phases:

1. DEFINE the processes that contribute to the problem.

2. MEASURE the capability of critical processes.

3. ANALYSE the data.

4. IMPROVE the key product / service characteristics.

5. CONTROL the key process variables.

6. STANDARDISE the methods for best-in-class process performance, and

7. INTEGRATE the standard methods and processes with the product / service design stage.

The Six Sigma strategy involves extensive use of statistical techniques such as control charts, design of experiments, response surface methodology etc. in order to minimise process variations and product / service defects. These techniques need to be applied in a structured manner.

While reporting the process improvement, Six Sigma teams use certain numeric values, known as Six Sigma Metrics. The most common metrics are 'Defects Per Million Opportunities (DPMO)', 'Sigma Quality Level', and 'Yield'.

'Defects Per Million Opportunities (DPMO)' is the number of critical defects that the process is estimated to generate per million opportunities (operations or steps). In shop-floor process control, this is also called defective 'Parts Per Million (PPM)' pieces produced by a single process / operation. 'Sigma Quality Level' is an indicator of process centering, and, process variation viz-a-viz technical tolerance. A process at Six sigma quality level is expected to generate only 3.4 defective Parts Per Million.

'Yield' is the estimated percentage of defect-free items (probability of zero defects) churned out by a process.

Based on the quality characteristic under study (variable / attribute data type), one or more metrics may be used for process monitoring and reporting.

It may be noted that the six sigma metrics are just the indicators of process quality. Sustaining and improving the process performance require process monitoring and control schemes such as Statistical Process Control (SPC), Engineering Process Control (EPC) etc.

Conclusion:

Six Sigma initiatives aim at reduction of process variations and defects. SPC and EPC are two important techniques for achieving these goals. Relatively inexpensive and easy to understand (requiring minimal support from external experts), it is a feasible proposition to implement these techniques in any organization

If you were an employer looking at a resume, which of the following entries would impress you more?

• Wrote news releases.

• Wrote 25 news releases in a three-week period under daily deadlines.

Clearly, the second statement carries more weight. Why? Because it uses numbers to quantify the writer's accomplishment, giving it a context that helps the interviewer understand the degree of difficulty involved in the task.

Numbers are powerful resume tools that will help your accomplishments get the attention they deserve from prospective employers. With just a little thought, you can find effective ways to quantify your successes on your resume. Here are a few suggestions:

Organizations are and always will be concerned about money. So as you contemplate your accomplishments and prepare to present them on your resume, think about ways you've saved, earned or managed money in your internships, part-time jobs and extracurricular activities so far. A few possibilities that might appear on a typical resume:

• Identified, researched and recommended a new Internet service provider, cutting the company's online costs by 15 percent.

• Wrote prospect letter that has brought in more than $25,000 in donations so far.

• Managed a student organization budget of more than $7,000.

You've heard the old saying, "Time is money," and it's true. Companies and organizations are constantly looking for ways to save time and do things more efficiently. They're also necessarily concerned about meeting deadlines, both internal and external. So whatever you can do on your resume to show that you can save time, make time or manage time will grab your reader's immediate attention. Here are some time-oriented entries that might appear on a typical resume:

• Assisted with twice-monthly payroll activities, ensuring employees were paid as expected and on time.

• Suggested procedures that decreased average order-processing time from 10 minutes to five minutes.

It's very easy to neglect mentioning how much or how many of something you've produced or overseen. There's a tendency instead to simply pluralize your accomplishments -- e.g., "wrote news releases" or "developed lesson plans" -– without including important specifics -- e.g., "wrote 25 news releases" or "developed lesson plans for two classes of 20 students each."

Don't fall into the trap of excluding numbers. Instead, include amounts, like these:

• Recruited 25 members for a new student environmental organization.

• Trained five new employees on restaurant operations procedures.

• Created process that bolstered production 25 percent

The more you focus on money, time and amounts in relation to your accomplishments, the better you'll present your successes and highlight your potential -- and the more you'll realize just how much you really have to offer prospective employers. Add it all up, and you'll see that playing the numbers game is yet another way to convince employers that you should be a part of their equation for success.

Achievements are the factors that really help you sell yourself to an employer. You can make the most of your accomplishments for job-search success at all stages of the process, that is, resume, cover letter, interview and further. Nowadays, resumes are expected to focus not only on regular job descriptions, but are also expected to include concrete and measurable accomplishments. Accomplishments and achievements are far more important than duties and responsibilities. It is surprising to know that a great number of clients are unable to formulate their achievements beyond the day-to-day tasks they performed in their jobs. A proper resume should be accomplishment-oriented, not responsibility-driven. The biggest mistake that people make is that they list their job responsibilities rather than mentioning the achievements. They overlook the fact that the employers already know the general responsibilities of a position and that what they really want to know is that if you have been a real mover and a shaker in your previous employment or not. In short, if a job activity cannot be portrayed as an achievement or accomplishment, it may not be worth mentioning in your resume, cover letter, or in an interview.

The candidate who gets the job is the one who contributed the most at past positions. Accomplishments are all that separate you from other equally qualified candidates, with one caveat. They must be quantified.

Here are some examples of Professional Accomplishments:

• Increasing the company’s bottom line.

• Streamlining procedures.

• Promotions.

• Special projects successfully completed.

• Decreasing costs.

• Company- or industry-sponsored awards.

• Certifications and licensure.

In contrast, the following would not be appropriate:

• Daily responsibilities that are included in your job description.

• Regular attendance at work.

• Getting along with co-workers.

• Working full-time while going to college at night.

• Volunteer or community service, unless it has a direct bearing on your job search.

An Accomplishment goes beyond your usual job description. But for it to have the most effect, it must be quantified.

Basically, professional achievements have three elements: what you did, how you did it, and the outcome of what you did for your company. There is a very thin line between achievements and the daily job responsibilities. To explain it further, we can take a few examples of the things, which cannot be termed as an achievement: daily responsibilities that are included in your job description, regular attendance at work, getting along with co-workers, working full-time while going to college at night and volunteering for community service, unless it has a direct bearing on your job search etc. On the other hand, the factors that ‘can’ be termed as a professional achievement are: increasing the company’s bottom line, facilitating its growth, streamlining procedures, promotions, special projects completed successfully, decreasing costs, company or industry-sponsored awards and certificates.