How do you measure your accomplishments for situations where you prevented something from happening that could have caused damage to the company?

Anonymous

June 5,2022 at 11:12PM UTC

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How do you measure your accomplishments for situations where you prevented something from happening that could have caused damage to the company?

I'm updating my resume and I'm struggling with how to quantify the numbers and if there's a general rule to use when measuring what didn't happen but could have.

I process transactions for a large organization. I have a talent for identifying possible issues in the system and will report it to management when I see a pattern. To quantify the numbers, I used a week's worth of the total transaction count as the transactions saved from posting incorrectly but wanted to see if there's a different approach I can use.

Just for context here, the problem identified was related to the routing or configuration set up to receive transactions electronically. It turned into a project and required collaborating with four other teams to fix, which took about five months to complete.

Any ideas or suggestions would be great!

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AnonymousJune 6,2022 at 12:00AM UTC
Just use an estimate. What is most important is how you describe how you saved the day and how it relates to the specific job duties in what you are applying for. Use an estimate that makes sense. A hiring mgr is not going to have access to tangible data to verify your numbers. So place more importance on describing what you did why it was critical to your organization impact and lessons learned. If you briefed your findings to leadership also elaborate on that
Heather CutlerJune 6,2022 at 2:17AM UTC
I agree with these comments, it will be impossible for a potential employer to verify the data you're providing and rather than focus on specific numbers, I'd capture this as risk mitigation and the tactics you used to detect and avoid these problems. Best of luck...this is a great skill to have!