If you’re not tracking your growth, what are you waiting for?
How I documented my growth as an intern at Shopify
Author: Peter Ip, August 17, 2020
🌱 tl;dr
- Documentation can be as easy or difficult as you want — from screenshots to recording information on a spreadsheet
- Understand outliers and trends from what you have documented
- Share what you have documented and reflect with your lead
- Documenting something is better than not documenting anything during your internship
- There’s no single method that works for everyone, so document something that you find value in
When I first started my design internship at Shopify, like most interns, I had a list of goals.
I wanted to improve on my storytelling, learn to facilitate design workshops, and build my design thinking process. More importantly, I wanted to grow. Grow as a designer and grow professionally. I was eager to accomplish my list of goals during my internship but there was one problem.
I’ve never had to track my growth at work before.
How do I even prove I am progressing?
How can I show to myself and to my team that I am reaching my goals?
Is it even important to track my professional growth or is it just some weird LinkedIn trend? 🤔
🔎 So first off, what is documentation? How does documentation relate to tracking growth?
1. Gathering artifacts
The first focus is on gathering artifacts. The artifact could be something as simple as a photo or more complex such as a spreadsheet. The key is that there is a tangible item being kept on record.
You should also ask yourself what kind of artifacts you want to gather, and why. Why are you choosing a spreadsheet over a photo? What are you trying to measure? Why are you choosing this medium over another?
2. Interpretation
Next, it’s about interpretation. Interpretation is also flexible. With all of these artifacts that you have gathered, it’s easy to spot trends or outliers you might want to address.
What does this certain trend mean? This is the part where you sit down and sort out the mess and piles of artifacts and try to make some sense of it.
3. Reflection
Finally, after you’ve gathered your artifacts and have found meaning for it, it’s time to reflect on it. You have spotted some trends and outliers and now it’s time to take action.
Perhaps you can identify areas for improvement? This is the part where it’s perfect to share the findings as well, perhaps with your lead, mentors, or peers to reflect together and get new perspectives and insight.
🧐 So now you know how it works. And you might be wondering, why should you document your growth?
That’s a fair question, why go through all this effort? Will this expose me as someone who isn’t that good in my role?
Here are some cold hard facts.
If you don’t document your growth or track anything, it’s difficult to realize where you started from and where you are now and connect the dots.
On the other hand, even if you document a very minor thing — such as your typing speed in a month’s worth of time. No matter if you got faster, slower, or stayed the same. You now have concrete evidence and data to find learning opportunities and see how you can grow and where you can grow.
🤩 Okay, so you’re interested. Let me show you some ways that I tracked my growth in my internship!
“Today I learned and accomplished”
This is one easy documentation method that I find very useful. Create a Google doc or keep a notebook to document something you’ve learned that day and something you’ve accomplished. It doesn’t have to be a great discovery, but it can be as small as learning how to record your screen on a MacBook or completing a small task such as editing a project brief. You’ll be amazed by the small details and how much you learn each day.
Pro tip: If you have time, at the end of each month you can sort the learnings out into groups and you’ll be able to find larger themes of what you have learned during your internship!
Skills & knowledge tracker
Another method I used was a skills & knowledge tracker. At the end of every month, I use this to self evaluate skills and knowledge related to design thinking and interaction design. I scrapped together these skills and knowledge criteria based on job postings or from internal documents.
Pro tip: Use emojis to track how you feel for your progress to make this tracker more visually intuitive and also relieves any pressure that is usually brought onto from a numbering or traditional rating system.
🚀 Summary
At the end of the day, there’s no single artifact or method that fits everyone because what you want to document and how you want to document is up to you. Maybe you are more of a visual learner, so you can opt to screenshot bits and pieces of work instead, or perhaps you prefer text over visuals. But either way, I wish you the best of luck and I hope this has helped you get started on documenting your growth in your professional career!
Originally published by Peter Ip at https://medium.com on August 17, 2020.
