Tips for crafting your career story

This article was produced as part of the NPA Summit 2023 student newsroom. Learn more about this year’s students and the event.

As a product thinker or journalist, you are an expert at telling user stories and crafting narratives for others—but can you weave your own career story with the same ease and skill?

Many people in these roles are trained to de-center themselves in their work, but when you network or interview for your next role, your career story should be just as cohesive as your portfolio. 

Jahna Berry, Chief Operating Officer at Mother Jones and leadership consultant, along with Megan Finnerty, storytelling consultant, coached 2023 News Product Alliance Summit attendees looking to hone this particular skill. While it can be challenging to craft a cohesive narrative about your work, especially if your career doesn’t seem linear to you, Berry emphasized that telling a great career story is all about practice.

Here are Berry and Finnerty’s tips and exercises to help you take your career story to the next level—or “how to talk about yourself so you spark curiosity and connection”—from the moment you meet someone.

How to facilitate connection. 

You’re more than just your job title. Instead of starting off with the title on your business card— which may not mean anything to someone outside your organization or industry — talk about what you do and why you do it.

What gets done because you’re on the team? How does the work align with your values or personal history? What are you passionate about? Use verbs that describe your why, and share why it matters to you or those around you. 

If you don’t have a great story about why you like your job or industry, you can talk about how you approach your work. Maybe you have always been passionate about learning from and working with smart people, and you love that you get to work on a cross-functional team and learn different things every day from people who have more expertise in that area than you. 

“I know a lot of us change our jobs a lot in journalism, or we might end up in places we didn't expect to be, and so it's also fair and reasonable for you to just love the way you do the work, or you love being this little part of a much bigger machine,” Finnerty said. “Those are totally normal ways to talk about your job, even if it's not connected to some big, big, big set of big values.”

And you don’t have to pitch yourself. Pitching yourself or trying to win someone over is built on a scarcity mindset; it’s transactional. However, the goal of networking should be to authentically learn about someone and connect with them.

When meeting someone new or networking, Berry said to think about telling your career story as an “energy exchange” and an opportunity to share your enthusiasm and passion.

“That feels so much better to me than saying, ‘I have to impress them with everything I know,’” Berry said. 

While you likely want to show new connections that you’re intelligent and knowledgeable, everything is based on relationships—your resume alone won’t get you the job. You need to be able to collaborate and interact with people, and lists of accomplishments don’t show why someone should talk to you and want to work with you in the future. 

Don’t let other people tell your story

Finnerty encourages you to follow Don Draper’s advice while talking about yourself: “If you don’t like what other people are saying, change the conversation.” 

People repeat the stories they hear, and you should be controlling your own narrative. Not all of your work is visible, and even if you’re public-facing, potential employers and co-workers don’t know what happens behind the scenes.

Additionally, negative self-talk or people telling you to “stay humble” can make it harder to believe that you have something to say, but you should own your experiences and keep telling your story.

“Just remember to ask yourself who benefits when you stay humble. It’s not you,” Finnerty said. “If you take nothing else away from this, just talk about yourself with pride.”

Data can’t talk — you have to explain it.

Think about this scenario: You worked on a product that caused users to spend 30% more time on the site. It was incredible work, but to others, what you did won’t necessarily be so clear.

Instead of leading with numbers, use your narrative abilities to share how you made an impact, and back that up with the data. Explain how you added value, and connect the dots between organizational or team goals and how your actions helped achieve them. 

Answer these questions: What do you do for people? What capability was unlocked due to your skills and approach? What is now possible?

If it’s difficult to determine what data is important, think about what information matters to the people you’re speaking with, such as how you moved the needle on a project similar to what they’re struggling with. 

You can get data about your impact from a few places depending on your role and the organization.

Ask the marketing or sales team, audience, finance, your supervisor or the in-house fundraising team if they can share how your work drives subscriptions, revenue, time on the site or other KPIs that are relevant to you. If information is confidential or proprietary, always ask your supervisor or another manager how you can appropriately describe your work.

Remember your audience.

If you’re meeting someone new outside of a job interview, they don’t need to know that you hit goals for all of your team’s KPIs or how many products you brought to market last year. Instead, talk about your passions. 

But when you’re talking to a hiring manager or the person you want to be your next supervisor in a more serious context, make sure to talk about your impact and use the data and insights you have.

“We say storytelling is a gift to give to listeners. What you're doing right now is a little gift you're going to give to everybody you meet for the rest of your life,” Finnerty said. “You're investing right this minute in all the future people you're going to connect with.”