Sit down to list everything worth mentioning to an employer hiring for your target role, and you might run out of ideas after ten minutes and nine lines. If you’re changing careers, those lines often all come from your most recent course, while you dismiss years of earlier work with a quick “That’s not relevant.”
Hold on! Before you decide what to say about yourself, you need to collect everything you could say. Most people remember only a fraction of their own work when asked cold. In this lesson, you’ll build an experience inventory, which is a raw, uncritical list of the things you’ve done, built, fixed, learned, organized, and helped with.
Listing and Judging Are Separate Jobs
The biggest trap here is judging while you list. “That’s not impressive.” “That wasn’t real tech work.” “Anyone would have done that.” Each of those thoughts deletes a line you might need later.
Take a line like “fixed the agency’s broken backup script.” It’s easy to skip because it feels too small. Yet it can turn into one of the strongest stories in your bank because it shows exactly the kind of unglamorous problem-solving a backend team relies on.
So make the rule explicit. There’s no judging at all during this pass. You’ll choose what to use in the next lessons. For now, nothing is too small, and nothing is too far from tech.
