After Action

An excellent skill and habit to develop is how to turn your experiences into something valuable for others and enriching for you.

This isn’t about how to take more photos of your nature hike to show off on social media; if anything, I think you should do less of that and just enjoy the clouds and trees and stuff. But when you do things in your career or education, your community, or even serious hobbies, learning to make a good “after-action report” is very valuable!

I see it all the time. People in a particular industry go to a conference or trade show of their own accord. If I ask them why they’re going, they say to learn, to network, to advance their careers, etc. Then they don’t really do any of those things!

They attend. But learning is very active. If you aren’t taking notes, practicing the skill, or rephrasing it to teach to others, your learning is very limited. Networking is very intentional; it doesn’t happen just because you show up, it happens because you find ways to make deliberate and meaningful connections with people who share your goals, interests, or talents. And what good does a conference do for your career if you don’t actually learn, don’t actually network – and nobody knows you went?

Give yourself the assignment. Imagine your boss said, “Hey, I want you to attend this conference and return with as much new information and as many new contacts as you can for the whole team. I want a report from you after the conference detailing what you’ve picked up and how you intend to teach it to the rest of the team, make introductions and set up meetings, and overall advance our strategic goals.” If you knew that was part of your job, you’d approach it very differently!

So do that. Are you a hobbyist painter who regularly shows off your work at small galleries? Write an after-action report, complete with pictures from the event! Are you doing a summer internship as part of your degree program? After-action report with a contact list and schedule of follow-up outreach!

You don’t have to show these to anyone; simply doing them for yourself will wonderfully enhance the value you gain from the endeavor. But of course, these also make great conversation starters. If you’re applying for your first job after college, saying “I had a summer internship” is pretty lacking as a compelling reason to hire you. But full details of the experience you gained, contacts you made, and problems you overcame? Maybe even a sample of the kind of work you did? Now you’re making your own credentials!

“But Johnny, in my summer internship/volunteer day/industry trade show I didn’t do anything worth writing about!” Yeah, because you didn’t go in knowing that you were going to have to! That’s why it’s such a good skill and habit: Even knowing that you’re going to hold yourself to it makes you take the whole thing more seriously, strive to do more, get more out of it. It provides wonderful clarity of purpose.

The next time you’re doing something like this, write up a little draft of your report first. Give the sections titles, like “People worth following up with” and “Skills to put into practice,” things like that. Have a good, clear reason about why you’re really doing it. And then use the report itself to talk to more people, and open up even more opportunities.

You know, instead of posting pictures of trees from your camping trip. Just enjoy the sunshine!