A self-evaluation is a great way to highlight your accomplishments and areas for growth. It’s also a good time to look back on your past performance and see how you’re doing compared to your goals.
Self-evaluation should be an ongoing process that helps you stay on track for your long-term goals. By taking the time to reevaluate your performance regularly, you’ll be able to better communicate your strengths and weaknesses with your manager.
1. Focus on Accomplishments
Accomplishments can help you stand out and make an impact on hiring managers, clients or other people evaluating your performance. They may be things like a new business project that saves the company money, improved the process or made something more efficient. They can also be personal accomplishments, such as raising money for a charity or working with student groups.
Your resume can include your accomplishments, but you can also add them to other documents, such as your job application or a professional portfolio. This is a great way to communicate your value to a hiring manager and show how you’ve gotten where you are today without having to provide a lengthy job description or a detailed career history.
You can also use your accomplishments to help you create SMART goals for your next review period. These should be measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. For example, if your goal is to increase conversion rates on your landing pages, you can set a specific number for your goal (such as 3%) and list some steps that you’ll take in order to reach this goal.
Self-evaluation is an opportunity for you to reflect on your strengths, areas of growth and core values. It’s important to be honest in this type of evaluation. However, you don’t want to be overly self-deprecating or snarky in your feedback.
Having an honest conversation about your strengths and weaknesses can show your boss that you care about your work and that you’re committed to putting in the time necessary to be successful at your job. It can also help you see how you need to change in order to continue to grow and develop professionally.
If you’re struggling to identify what you have done well in your current position, consider looking at past reviews or performance evaluations. You might be surprised at how many achievements you haven’t recognized.
A key element of effective self-evaluations is to highlight your strengths while addressing any areas that need improvement, says Leslie Mizerak, an executive coach at edtech company NimblyWise. She suggests writing a self-evaluation that is tailored to the needs of your job and department, which can be beneficial for both you and your boss.
2. Highlight Areas for Growth
Whether you have an annual performance review or need to complete a self-evaluation, it’s always helpful to remember your accomplishments and strengths as well as your areas for growth. However, if you’re not prepared for this process, it can be challenging to recall all of your successes from a year or more ago, let alone keep track of the progress you’ve made towards those goals and areas of improvement.
Keeping notes about your accomplishments and strengths in a private or shared Fellow stream will help you to quickly recall what you’ve done over the past year and how you’ve grown within the company. Plus, sharing your notes with your manager will make it easier to highlight what you’ve accomplished and how you can improve.
Your self-evaluation should also contain a section to identify your core values and explain how you embody each trait. This will be helpful for your manager to understand how you are a role model and can help them build a positive work environment.
While some self-evaluation templates have a specific format for this, many don’t, and some are more open and fill-in-the-blank. No matter how it’s structured, a good self-evaluation should include practical examples, facts and figures to back up your statements.
If your company uses a specific set of metrics for promotion, it’s important to be able to provide statistics that will allow you to demonstrate how you’ve achieved those goals. This will make it easier for your manager to see how your hard work and dedication have contributed to the success of the organization.
Similarly, if your company doesn’t have a formal system for this, be sure to use the time in your evaluation to pinpoint skills that need work and set a goal for yourself to gain that skill set. This will ensure you’re putting your best foot forward, and you’ll have a better chance of achieving your career goals.
The most important thing to remember when completing your self-evaluation is to remain positive and professional throughout the process. Rather than playing the blame game or tooting your own horn, focus on the areas that need work and the lessons you’ve learned from those challenges. This will allow you to come away from your self-evaluation feeling energized and ready to take on the next challenge.
3. Communicate Your Goals
If you’re facing a self-evaluation at your job, it’s crucial to communicate your goals. You’re likely preparing for a performance review or a promotion, and your manager may want to see how you’ve progressed since the last evaluation. Whether you’re writing a templated scorecard or an informal, fill-in-the-blank document, it’s important to communicate your goals in a clear, honest and meaningful way.
Your self-evaluation is a chance to give your employer a comprehensive look at you, and this can help you make smarter, more strategic decisions about your career. It’s also a chance to highlight your strengths and areas for growth, so make sure to include these in your evaluation.
As a leader, you have the power to make self-evaluation a part of your team’s culture. That means bringing it to the forefront during your meetings, coaching sessions and even one-on-one feedback sessions with managers, according to Thomas Begley, professor of management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
A successful self-evaluation process depends on a balance of both internal and external perspectives, which is described as an “even, delicate, relationship” by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich in a Harvard Business Review article. This balance helps your evaluation avoid being one-sided or negative, which is critical to employee satisfaction and performance.
Once you’ve identified your strengths and areas for improvement, it’s time to create SMART goals for your next review period. These goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely.
You can use your SMART goals to showcase your achievements in a variety of ways, such as by creating trainings and presentations or even by giving a conference talk. It’s also a great way to demonstrate your expertise in your field and to legitimize the value you provide.
In addition, you can use your SMART goals to track your progress toward them, which is key for keeping your eyes on the prize. You can also use your SMART goals to help you determine if you’re making good progress or if you need to work on improving certain aspects of your performance.
It’s a good idea to carve out two to three hours to complete your self-evaluation, so make sure you have plenty of time to think about what you’re highlighting and what you’re working toward. This will ensure your assessment isn’t rushed and that you can take the time to write out your goals in a clear and concise way.
4. Recalibrate Your Goals
While a self-evaluation isn’t for the faint of heart, there comes a time when you need to take a step back and look at your accomplishments from a new perspective. Often this is the best time to start thinking about your long-term goals and how you want to achieve them. This will help you make smarter decisions about your future role, reassess your current job and decide where you want to be in five years.
A good way to start is to set goals that are actually measurable and attainable. For example, if your goal is to get 10 more people to attend your next in-person demonstration, it’s important to understand how you plan to measure that. The best way to do this is to use a reputable data source, such as a customer satisfaction survey or employee reviews on your website. In addition, you’ll need to be clear about what your metrics are and why they are important. This will help ensure that you’re not wasting your time and your company’s money on goals that won’t deliver.