How Process Documentation Helped Me Get Ahead in My Career

Pictures from 2002 after I had already been working there two years. Picture includes: Rebecca with Kimberly (who trained me on my receptionist job), my manager Getty who challenged me to improve our processes and Claudette who when I moved into the Accounts Receivable/Payable role, taught me everything I needed to know and became a dear friend. 

Back in 2000, I was 17 years old and had just moved to Minneapolis to go to college. I knew that my school did not have reciprocity with my home state of Iowa when it came to tuition. If I had gone to a school in Wisconsin, I could have paid in-state tuition.

As a result, I knew I would need to work to pay for school. But no one seemed to want to give a 17-year-old newly minted college student a full-time job.

I ended up going through a temp agency and landed a position working for a city contractor. The company was contracted to manage many of the parking garages in downtown Minneapolis. They needed a receptionist. I needed a job. A match was made!

My job as a receptionist wasn’t just saying “hi” to folks as they came in for appointments and meetings. As it turned out, there were many parts to my new role. One of these parts involved helping their human resources department identify people to become cashiers in their various parking garages as there was a huge amount of turnover in those positions.

When someone wanted to apply for this role, it wasn’t just a quick one-and-done application process. They had to come in and ask for an application, fill that out, and then schedule an exam. Part of my job was to administer that test, review it, and then enter those who met the required scoring threshold into the system. This would let the HR department know who could be brought in for interviews.

I also worked with accounts payable & receivable. As the receptionist, I was tasked with opening all the incoming mail. If I opened an invoice or a receipt, I needed to find that account, log the reference number, indicate whether it needed to be paid or had been paid, and then hand everything over to the accounting department.

Essentially, there was a lot of data entry that came with the job. This data entry facilitated the operation of many other departments. I knew it was important, but I wanted more.

I was young, but I was a smart. I’d graduated in the top percentage of my high school class. I learned that maintaining a full-time job and residence for a year meant that I could receive in-state tuition. But if I was going to commit 40 hours a week to something, I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to learn and grow as much as this company would let me. Thankfully, I had some wonderful mentors who recognized that I was willing and capable. They were very open to my idea of beginning to climb that proverbial ladder within their company. But first, they had a request --

“We need you to document everything you do so that we can bring in somebody behind you, you can train them, and they can do just as good of a job as you do.”

They knew that the work I was doing in my current position was valuable to the company. They had to replicate it before it would be valuable to move me elsewhere. If all the processes I implemented disappeared, it could prove disastrous because they were inextricably linked with multiple departments across the organization.

This taught me very early in my career that if I want to move into a different role, hand off my work and guarantee it’s done well, get ahead in my career, or generally delegate while maintaining quality, process documentation is the only way.

So, I set to work documenting all the processes for the receptionist that would come after me. Not only did this make for a rather easy “changing of the guard,” but doing so helped me get clear about which ladder I wanted to climb. I had my hands in processes all across the company, so I could ask myself, which do I enjoy the most? Which am I passionate about?

I handed off one set of processes and began learning a new set in the accounts payable department.

Later, I would do the same thing in this department – documenting all the processes so that whoever came next would be successful. Remember: I had a ladder to climb!

You can’t step onto the next rung if the rung you’re standing on crumbles.

I wasn’t looking at this job as something I just do every day to earn a paycheck. I looked at it as an opportunity.

I realized that future prospective employers would want me more than other candidates because I not only had the education, but I also had experience. I wanted that experience to be rich and broad. Consequently, as I was training so many people behind me to take over roles, it was here that I got my very first experience as a trainer. Something I now do as the primary part of my job two decades later. You never know where the road (or ladder) will take you.

I looked at my years in undergraduate as a time to take classes and earn my degree, but I also looked at it as a time to garner the experience I wanted. The company I was working for allowed that. But more precisely, PROCESS DOCUMENTATION allowed that.

At the time, I didn’t call what I was doing process documentation. I just knew I had to document the steps that somebody must do to do a good job on this “thing.” Whatever the “thing” may be. Now that I know about process documentation, and teach it to others, that’s still how I define it.

Process Documentation = Documenting the steps that somebody must do to do a good job on a thing.

Don’t get hung up on the particulars. Focus on ensuring that somebody would do a good job behind you. Imagine you’re turning over the keys to the kingdom. What are the steps someone would need to take to make sure the kingdom continues to run as you ran it? That’s it; that’s what process documenting is all about.

As a very young professional, I was able to innovate and create new processes. Then, through process documentation, I could leave behind a gift – the gift of what good looks like, the gift of the steps to achieve it, the gift of my tacit knowledge becoming documented knowledge. For an organization that allowed me to grow and scale, I was more than happy to do so.  

Create the Space™ for Process Documentation,

Rebecca

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