On Saturday, February 22, the Office of Personnel Management emailed civil servants with the subject line, “What did you do last week?” The body of the message read, ominously: “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” Elon Musk, the billionaire head of the Department of Government Efficiency, confirmed the message’s legitimacy on X, adding: “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Some federal agencies, including NASA, pushed back on the directive. But last week, NASA released an official app for its civil servants to submit weekly “5 things” bullet points.
“This tool is internal to NASA and restricted to civil servant use only,” NASA’s CIO, Jeff Seaton, assured employees. “The information collected will not be sent outside of NASA. The app serve as a communication tool between employees and their supervisors.” But it doesn’t take a psychic to see where all this is going.
YOUR NEW MANAGER IS A.I.
Only about a hundred people work for DOGE, according to President Trump, but over two million civil servants work for the federal government. If every such employee is required, ultimately, to submit weekly progress reports, there is no way DOGE can keep up without rehiring those 80,000 Veterans Affairs workers they want to fire. Which means the government is about to unleash artificial intelligence on the federal workforce.
Anyone who has used A.I. knows how confused it can get, and its proclivity for hallucinating facts. A lot of livelihoods might soon be at the mercy of a capricious, delusional, mercurial algorithm. That’s a lot to pin your mortgage and child’s tuition on. Obviously, all this is unprecedented, and there is no established federal standard for what a “good” set of bullet points looks like. (I suspect that all “5 things” lists workers are submitting to OPM are being used to train an eventual A.I. system.)
STRATEGIES FOR WRITING EFFECTIVE “5 THINGS”
Resume consultants and job coaches have spent the last decade mastering how computers read the career-changing documents we write. Long gone are the days when well-meaning hiring managers at large corporations sorted and read hundreds of job applications and cover letters. Instead, it’s all done by computer. (Notably, the federal government resume system is not automated—yet.) So I reached out to a couple of career coaches for their best advice for making weekly bullet points algorithm-proof.
“Where written content is being evaluated by AI, keywords are bound to be crucial,” said Thea Kelley, a job search coach and the author of Get That Job! The Quick & Complete Guide to a Winning Interview. Supervisors might have insight on which keywords are the most important. Just knowing the rules of the game at an office level can be valuable in uncertain times. Managers might know more than you think, and are telegraphing that in their own correspondence. “Taking note of the language used in internal communications may also be helpful, especially in official messages from senior management,” she said.
CONTEXT IS KING…
According to Nancy Segal, a career coach who specializes in federal resume writing and career services, people should think in terms of CCAR: Context, Challenge, Action, Result. When writing “5 things” accomplishment bullet points, ask yourself: What was the challenge? What did you do? And what was the result? “That’s how people should answer interview questions. That’s how people should write their resume accomplishments. That’s how they should write their annual self-assessment as part of their performance review,” she said.
But it’s not necessarily as intuitive as you might think. “People mistake duties for accomplishments all the time,” said Segal, who is also author of Solutions For Starting Your Federal Career Transition. “They will write, ‘I did X.’ Well that’s your job—that’s not an accomplishment. Accomplishments demonstrate your value or articulate the ‘so-what.’”
In a very simple example, a worker might say they created a spreadsheet. “To which I would reply, ‘So what?’” she said. “Does anybody use this spreadsheet? What’s its impact?”
…AND NUMBERS ARE CONTEXT
One way to illustrate impact and context are by using numbers. “Numbers give context to your work,” said Segal. Suppose you developed a website. How many users benefit? How many hits did you get in the first 30 days? “Numbers provide scope to the work, because many readers won’t have a clue.” Another example she gave of a weak accomplishment is: “Led a team.” She explained, “Is it a team of one or is it a team of one thousand? Did you ‘Approve contracts,’ or did you lead three contracts this week valued in excess of $15 million? One is much more impactful than the other.”
Kelley suggested being strategic in all this. “Quantify where it shows value, and not where it doesn’t. Use a percentage if it makes a better impression than a number. If exact metrics aren’t available, use terms like ‘approximately,’ ‘at least’ or ‘less than.’ Within the limits of ethics and accuracy, try different ways of expressing data.”
CONSIDER YOUR AUDIENCE
When writing your “5 things” lists, said Segal, it’s important to keep in mind who is developing the algorithms to read them. “Because this crowd thinks the government is a business, I would make sure the language that employees use is translatable to people who don’t necessarily know how government works,” she said. Until the OPM standardizes requirements for civil servants, expect the reader—artificial or not—to lack you expertise. “We don’t know yet what this looks like or how it is going to play out. But the more results-focused you are, and the more numbers you have, the better.”
At least until things settle, Kelley encourages federal employees to keep their options open and make a plan. “Exploring alternative career paths is recommended,” she said, “as well as engaging a coach sooner than later.” Other displaced employees may soon crowd those pathways.
