Maintain a daily diary within your current job.  Every meeting you attend, every project on which you work, and every analysis that you complete, should have some mention in your daily diary.  You simply need to capture a few bullet points at the end of each day in a MS Word document.

I actually wrote down positive feedback from people regarding my comments during meetings.  This is critical for several reasons.  One, it serves as a great reference as you prepare for your manager reviews.  You have the input and evidence easily accessible to refer to as you complete your review.  Second, and more importantly, as I had alluded to earlier, it provides you a place to capture the portfolio of new skills that you are developing in your internship.

You should be tailoring your existing experience to ideally give you the skills and bullet points on your resume for your ideal role or your next one  Let’s take Sony as an example.  Suppose that you are interested in working in corporate strategic planning at Sony.  Presumably this role encompasses market research and segmentation, customer penetration strategy, financial modeling around growth opportunities, and significant interaction with cross functional teams.  Now your focus over the next year should be to obtain each and every one of those prerequisite skills on your resume through the course of your work.

One of the most disciplined methods to keep track of this is through a daily diary. Be thinking of how you can reposition a meeting, project, or analysis to align with your fulltime tasks.  For example, if you are interviewing potential customers for a new product launch and are capturing that data, you most certainly can develop market segments from the output.  Even if your sample set of interviewees is already within a predetermined segment, you may be able to find out more information about them that would allow you to segment them even further.  This can be placed on your resume.  The same can be said for the next bullet point and so on. The daily diary allows you to encapsulate all of these skills to help build your new resume and get you one step closer to being on a closed interview invite list or to having your initial contact responded to from the target organization.

I did just that at Genuity, a pubic telecommunications services firm at which I was a Product Manager.  As a product manager, one is exposed to not only a variety of functions and tasks, but also to a multitude of groups within the organization.  Incidentally, my daily diary provided some excellent content for business school essays.  However, the real value from the diary came from my ability to sift through its content years later and help re-position my resume and create new bullet points depending upon the job or role to which I was applying.  Take the time to make a daily professional diary and you won’t regret it.