Week 3

Discuss Documenting Your Skills and Accomplishments

The following scenario is based on real-life current events.

Tara was frustrated, angry, and scared. She had just been notified via Zoom that she had been laid off.

Two years earlier, after graduating at the top of her class and earning a degree in software programming, she was hired by one of the largest social media technology companies in the world as a product developer. Tara was so excited to be starting her dream career in an organization with virtually endless opportunities for growth. In addition, her starting salary was in the six-figure range (over $100,000), and she had even gotten a signing bonus due to pandemic-related growth in the use of social media as people stayed home more.

But now as the pandemic was finally drawing to an end, her company’s growth had slowed considerably. People were going back to work and spending more time outdoors. As a result, they were spending less time on their devices, and this meant trouble for Tara’s company. Her company had hired far more people than it needed, and that meant layoffs.

When Tara got the message that she needed to attend an important meeting, she thought it might be a company-wide announcement of future layoffs or possibly a voluntary early retirement plan. Instead, it was a one-on-one meeting with a representative from human resources telling her that her employment had been terminated. She would be provided only a few weeks of severance pay because she’d been with the company for only a short time, and she was required to return her company-issued laptop and smartphone. Furthermore, her company email address and access to the company’s networks had already been disabled.

Unfortunately, Tara had been keeping all the evidence of her accomplishments, including the many projects she had worked on, on the company’s internal servers. Now, she no longer had access to any of it.

How will Tara be able to show her skills to potential employers without access to these important documents?

In your initial post, please answer the following questions.

• What should Tara have done differently?
• Have you ever found yourself in a similar situation to Tara? If so, what did you do?
• How do you document your skills and accomplishments? How do you store them for safe keeping?