Throughout your career, you may encounter instances in which your boss requires that you write a self-assessment also known as self-evaluation or self-review so it’s important to learn how to write a self-assessment at work. Employers do this to evaluate individual performance, identify the root reasons for productivity challenges, and promote employee self-awareness. Understanding how to write a self-assessment at work is crucial for personal and professional development.
In this post, we define self-assessment, demonstrate how to write it in ten steps, discuss its benefits to both managers and provide examples to help you examine your performance.
What Exactly Is a Self Assessment?
A self-evaluation is a process of monitoring, analysing, and reviewing your professional actions and career growth. It is also known as a self-assessment, self-review, or self-appraisal. When an employer asks you to write a self-appraisal, they want you to reflect on your performance at work and identify your key strengths and flaws. The major goal of this is to allow you to better grasp the scope of your abilities and improve on them.
What Topics Are Usually Covered in a Self Assessment?
Self-evaluations often encompass a wide range of issues that evaluate an employee’s performance, contributions, and progress during a specific period. In self evaluations, the following subjects are frequently covered:
- Accomplishments
This involves a review of major projects, tasks, and accomplishments completed by the employee throughout the review period.
- Objects and Goals
This comprises an assessment of the employee’s progress towards individual goals and objectives, as well as any revisions or updates to their goals for the next period.
- Contributions to the Organisation and Team
This includes assessing the employee’s contributions to the team and organisation, which may include collaboration, communication, and leadership.
- Competencies and Abilities
This comprises a self-assessment of the employee’s present abilities and competencies, as well as any areas in which they need to improve.
- Professional Advancement
This involves an evaluation of the employee’s attempts to further their professional development and advancement, such as taking on new duties, seeking extra training and development opportunities, and soliciting input from others.
Steps to Write a Successful Self Assessment
Writing a self-review is frequently a multi-step process that requires you to concentrate on your achievements, ambitions, hobbies, and essential abilities. Here are ten actions you may follow to create an excellent self-review to send to your boss:
#1. Inquire With Your Employer About How They Want to Utilise Your Self-Evaluation
Your employer may request that you write your self-appraisal for a variety of reasons, such as writing your performance review or considering granting you a raise. Knowing how they want to utilise your self-evaluation may help you decide what to emphasise.
#2. Begin by Outlining Your Strengths
Think about your successes in the last few months or years. You can, for example, emphasise new talents you’ve acquired or how you helped the organisation increase income by always hitting your sales targets.
#3. Prioritise the Items on Your List
Emphasise the accomplishments that your employer may find most relevant. For example, if they want to review your performance because they want to promote you for a management position, consider focusing on accomplishments that demonstrate your leadership, organisational, and management skills.
#4. Consider Your Measurable Achievements
Measuring your success might help you construct a more complete and objective self-evaluation. You can accomplish this by gathering data from previous initiatives and wording it as follows: I raised my lead generation by 30% last year.
#5. Determine Areas for Growth
After summing up your achievements, assess your flaws and areas for growth. Recognising your on-the-job issues indicates that you are a self-aware professional looking to develop yourself.
#6. Align Your Self-Evaluation With the Goals of Your Team
When analysing your performance, strengths, and flaws, keep your team’s or employer’s organisational goals in mind. Aligning your professional objectives with theirs is an excellent way to demonstrate that you are a team player who understands how to set career goals while also making it easy to collaborate with others.
#7. Mention Your Professional Ambitions
Mentioning your professional goals can assist you in showing your employer where you want to take your career. For example, they may decide to give you new duties or transfer you to a different function within the company to help you advance professionally.
#8. Ask for Opportunities for Growth
If you’ve been considering earning a new certification, attending an industry conference, or attending a training session to help you enhance your work-related skills, you must include it in your self-appraisal. Your employer is likely ignorant of this yet would be willing to provide you with those prospects for advancement.
#9. Positive Language
Remember to use positive language in your self-assessment, even when expressing your challenges, weaknesses, or things you detest about your employment. This demonstrates how motivated you are to learn and remain upbeat under any circumstance.
#10. Read Through Your Self-Review
Before submitting your self-review, go over it well to catch any typos or errors. Making sure the text is grammatically perfect demonstrates how attentive you are to detail and how seriously you take self assessment.
Example of Self-Evaluation
Depending on the needs of your employer, you may want to write your self-review in the style of bullet points or a continuous text that explains your employment triumphs and career ambitions. Here’s an example of a self-review that may be useful in developing your own:
‘In this self-evaluation, I identify my professional skills and report on my recent achievements. I also list a few areas where I’d like to improve in the future. In terms of my strengths, I had a great influence on our team this year by maintaining a positive attitude and completing major objectives in my role throughout each quarter, even when juggling multiple projects at the same time.
The office manager congratulated me after I finished the most recent upgrade to our company system for maintaining a casual demeanour, which encouraged the rest of the development team to stay optimistic and interested.
This year, I represented the company at a design convention, a networking event where I assisted in the recruitment of three possible candidates, and interviews with some new clients. I also provided on-site training sessions regularly to help our freelancing crew enhance their understanding and command of fundamental programming languages.
I’d like to strengthen my in-office communication in the following year. I want to accomplish this by holding regular face-to-face meetings with our project managers. I am confident that this will enable me to eliminate any possibility of misinterpretation.”
Advantages of Self-Assessment for Managers and Staff
Self assessments are beneficial to both managers and employees for a variety of reasons. On the surface, self-assessments appear to be a performance management tool used to keep staff on track. Here are some of the advantages that self-evaluations provide both employees and employers:
Advantages to Managers
Self-assessment can be a valuable tool for managers and employers, providing a variety of advantages. The following are four advantages of self-evaluations for managers:
#1. Improved Performance
However, research indicates that self-assessments have a favourable impact on personal and professional development. One study discovered that using self-assessments boosted performance and self-directed learning skills significantly.
#2. Increased Employee Involvement
Managers have a tremendous impact on the employee experience. A self-assessment can be the first step towards open, clear, and transparent communication between managers and staff. Employee engagement can be increased when employees understand what is expected of them and what they need to work on.
#3. Improved Goal-Setting
Self-assessments also assist supervisors in gaining a better grasp of an employee’s goals at work. Knowing what employees want from their work and what they perceive to be their strengths and shortcomings can help managers lead more effectively.
Advantages For workers
Knowing how to write a self-assessment that reflects growth and learning at work can positively impact performance evaluations. Employees profit from self-assessments in the same way that supervisors do. We’ve listed four ways self-assessments can help employees.
- Increased Self-awareness
A self-assessment might serve as a mirror or point of reflection. BetterUp employs a whole-person model to assist our members in accurately gaining self-awareness and self-reflection.
- Grow Self-esteem
A self-assessment, however scary, isn’t simply for discovering what isn’t functioning. It’s also a reassurance of what’s working well for many employees, especially when your management agrees.
- Provides possibilities for additional professional growth
Self-assessments, in conjunction with learning and development, can assist in determining where employees should engage in professional development.
Assume your employee conducts a self-assessment and discovers they are lacking in project management abilities. As a result of the assessment, you can provide project management workshops to assist with their professional development.
Best Practises for Self-Assessment Writing
Employees need guidance on how to write an effective self-assessment at work, emphasising achievements and areas for achievement. The following are the best practices:
#1. Be Truthful
Be honest with yourself while writing a review of your work performance. Everyone has skills and shortcomings, and a self-assessment is intended to showcase those strengths on the job. They also enable employees to devise suggestions for how to improve their areas of weakness. Make an honest effort to mention moments when you fell short at work, whether it was something minor like arriving a few minutes late to a meeting or something more serious like missing an important deadline.
#2. Be Confident
You should be proud of your work, and there is nothing wrong with expressing that pride through a self-assessment. While being honest about work blunders is important in a self-assessment, you should also describe moments when you went above and beyond.
#3. Make an Effort to Improve
A self-assessment is all about determining what you need to do to improve your work, and there is always room for improvement. Make sure to express how you wish to continue progressing in your self-assessment. Expressing an interest in learning new ways to improve your work habits, skills, and weaknesses can make you appear to be an employee who will grow with the organisation.
#4. Maintain a Professional Demeanour
In a self-assessment, you should never make anything personal. This includes not disparaging your manager or supervisor for inadequate leadership abilities or blaming a colleague for a less-than-satisfactory outcome in a collaborative endeavour.
It also entails accepting responsibility for your faults at work. Being professional also entails taking performance evaluation and self-assessment seriously. Take the time to write a quality review that isn’t rushed or forced but instead is full of insights and solutions.
#5. Allow yourself plenty of time
A hurried self-assessment will not benefit anyone. Make time for self-reflection beforehand, and take your time and give it some consideration when you get down to writing your self-assessment. This is one of the rare opportunities you’ll have in the workplace to advocate for yourself and remind your boss why you’re so good at your job.
This is also an excellent moment to inform management that you are having difficulty with something and to inquire about any professional development programmes offered by your organisation to assist you in addressing these issues.
#6. Make It Specific
Use explicit examples as much as possible during your self-assessment. For example, if you take the time to write about how you routinely undertake the majority of the work required to finish group tasks, include three or four examples. Don’t be ashamed to admit that you stayed up all night to ensure that a deadline was reached. Or that you were the one who pushed your coworkers to make use of numbers.
Data can be used to persuade an employer that your work has benefited the company. Back up assertions about your accomplishments with numbers when drafting a self-assessment. If you write in your self-assessment that you are fantastic at figuring out methods to reduce the amount of time your team spends on projects, make sure to include how much time you have saved. By including concrete figures in your self-assessment, your boss or company will be able to construct a metre to measure your accomplishments. Â
What Should I Write in My Self-Assessment Performance Review?
Accept responsibility for your mistakes and weaknesses; explain what happened, what you learned from them, and how you’ll use them to grow and be better in the future. Then, to improve weak areas, make SMART (specific, measurable, realistic, relevant, and timely) goals for yourself.
What Are Some Sentences for Self-Evaluation?
“I adjusted my initial goal because [reason] and was able to meet my adjusted goal by [explain how you met the goal].” “I exceeded my initial goal by [amount].”
How Do You Write a Performance Summary?
A performance evaluation comment should highlight the employee’s strengths and areas for growth; be precise and include examples to back up your input; and be constructive by recommending how they can improve rather than just pointing out the negative.
What Is a Good Example of Poor Performance?
Employee underperformance may include failing to meet an acceptable standard of work, failing to comply with work policies and procedures, or engaging in behaviours that negatively affect others (such as gossiping, coming up late, or failing to notify colleagues if they are unable to complete work on time).
How Would You Characterise Bad Work Performance?
Poor work performance occurs when an employee fails to meet the expectations or responsibilities of their job; an employee may also be underperforming if they do not meet their objectives or milestones in a specific time frame.
Conclusion
Employees often struggle with how to write balanced self-assessment work, capturing achievements without sounding boastful. It’s critical to ensure that you’re maximising the potential of your staff, and self-assessments are a good place to start in determining what potential exists within your people (and your organisation).
BetterUp can assist you in evaluating your own or your colleagues’ performance; an employee self-evaluation can be the key to improving teamwork, job performance, and work ethic. Learning how to write a concise yet impactful self-assessment at work is a valuable skill for career advancement.
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