What order should I prepare a job change in?
How to prepare for a job change
Don't start with the resume. Gather two years of evidence first; the sentences come last.
Changing the order saves the time
Most people open the resume file first and then spend days staring at it. The sentences resist not because of writing skill but because there is no material.
Reverse it. Gather evidence first, write last. With evidence in hand the resume becomes an editing task and takes a day.
Step 1 — sweep the last two years
List everything you remember without judging quality. Calendars, Slack search, file modification dates, and your design tool's file list are good prompts.
The goal here is coverage, not selection. Judgment comes later. Most people surface far more than the three or four items they first recall.
Step 2 — pick 3 to 5 and attach evidence
Select against what the target role asks for. Not your best work — your most relevant work.
Attach evidence to each: artifacts, before-and-after, scope, rejected alternatives. If nothing surfaces at this step, that item will be hard to defend in an interview too.
Step 3 — turn it into sentences
Resume bullets: one per line, starting with a verb. Case studies: request, constraints, choice, artifact, change. Interview answers: situation, task, action, result — which reads aloud as-is.
The same material yields all three formats. That is why steps 1 and 2 determine most of the total time.
What to do now for the next time
Go through this once and you will go through it again. At a three-year cycle, that is several days lost every three years.
The prevention is small: five minutes a week. Next time you open the resume, steps 1 and 2 are already done.
The bottleneck in a job change is evidence, not phrasing. no7ch removes that bottleneck in advance by accumulating a weekly record.