Tweet: Every career offers Thrillers, Fillers, & Killers in how it translates in a résumé. Learn the alchemy of getting the gold in any situation!

In metallurgy and in metal refining dross is the mass of solid impurities floating on hot, pure, molten metal or something that is dispersed in the metal. It is formed by oxidation of the molten metal and is entirely a waste product. Although dross is usually associated with base metals, such a lead, tin, and zinc, gold refining creates it, too! It floats on the top of molten gold and must be removed to purify and to make the gold more valuable in its application.

How does this dross metaphor enter as you manage your career? Simple. Every career has a certain arc to it and the purpose of any professional is to identify a career that engages them and to rise in it to get to the top. By this I do not mean getting to a point of making the most money or achieving the highest status in your profession, but engaging yourself in a way that rewards your work, makes you grow, and draws you respect of your peers and others within your own professional ecosystem.

Managing one’s résumé is at the heart of how they manage their career. A résumé has two aspects to it: its content on the one hand (gold) and how it is packaged to show it in the best light of how a career is managed (what have you done with that gold). Many surrender their résumé management process to the jobs they engage in and do not pay much attention to how they can change the way a résumé shapes up by doing these jobs differently. As a result, they are often at a disadvantage in how they are able to leverage their past momentum to land exciting gigs, put their career on a steeper arc, and to achieve more within the same time compared to those who are not as inspired or diligent about managing their résumés.

So, what does one have to do to maximize the gold in their career and to keep the dross to a minimum? Here is my suggestion:
1. Accept that only you are responsible for managing your résumé, and not your boss or your company. I cannot even count how many of my clients come to me complaining or lamenting how they were misled by their boss, company, or others in power that caused them to choose options that did not help their career.
2. Clearly understand how to spot résumé Thrillers, Fillers, and Killers throughout your career. A Thriller in your résumé is an entry from a stint that exploits your innate gifts (“your genius”) and allows you to claim coveted accomplishments that can be a differentiator for you in a competitive market. A Filler entry or bullet typically reflects that in the absence of anything exciting you were cruising along and doing the everyday stuff in your job (half awake) and staying out of trouble. As the adjective suggests such entries merely act as space takers in your otherwise compelling narrative. A Killer entry, on the other hand, sets you back in being seen as a positively impactful leader (“Initiated a new concept for the next-gen product that quickly led to loss of market dominance and company’s eventual acquisition by a major competitor.”)
3. In my dealings with clients when they are putting their leadership narrative together in their résumé they often shortchange their accomplishments by disparaging their work in how they perceive it. For example, if they came up with a great product idea and they led the efforts to get the product to launch by doing all the right things their responsibility as a Product Development Manager mostly ends at product launch. How the product performed in the market after its launch is often the result of the contributions of Product Managers, Marketing, and other support functions, not wholly my client’s. Yet, many struggle with claiming this as a worthy accomplishment in their résumé. So, to weed out the dross from the gold in this example, focusing on your own accomplishment, and not your company’s, can serve you better.
4. Do not assume that all Killer assignments will end up as they started. Often, projects get into trouble for a variety of reasons: incompetent players, politics, lack of resources, changing requirement, among others. If you can spot a “loser” opportunity, take it on after doing some due diligence on it, and then turn it around and deliver what was otherwise a lost cause (“dross”), you can transform the same assignment into a Thriller bullet for your résumé. In some cases of my clients when they came to me for help when their career was languishing—even tanking, identifying such opportunities helped them turn around their situation.
5. Many Filler assignments can also be transformed into veritable gold by looking at them differently. For example, one of my clients was Manager of Engineering Services, where he was responsible for providing the infrastructure to enable product design (provide platforms, tools, and ongoing services to help developers do their jobs). In his otherwise mundane and stultifying job we decided to look at the system development life cycle (SDLC) in his company and concluded that by making incremental and transformational changes to the infrastructure the design cycle time and the outgoing design quality could be dramatically improved in about 12-18 months. By proposing this and by making a business case for this to implement my client was able to achieve most of what he promised in delivering the next-gen infrastructure and services that changed how new products were developed in that company. Soon after that success he was able to land as a director of engineering services at a larger company.
Any job or career can be perceived as replete with too much dross and too little gold. As examples in this blog suggest the perspective lies in how you view what you see and how you mine it to bring home pure gold and make your career shine.
Good luck!