Reviews are not a particularly popular subject; self-evaluations are often despised. It’s hard to know how to highlight your achievements and accomplishments.
But there are steps you can take to ensure your self-evaluations help to advance your own career and provide valuable feedback to your organisation.
Here are a few tips that will come in handy for self-evaluation:
* Self-evaluation should not be focused only on your job, but also on your long term career plan.
From an employee perspective, if there is not a career plan in place, or if there is one but it’s not consistently followed, then it is time to discuss about your plans to your manager and make sure you both are in agreement.
* Mapping your accomplishments to business value is essential to a more meaningful self-assessment, especially if your company’s performance reviews have a direct effect on wage increases or bonuses.
* Approach your supervisor and ask how self-evaluations are used by the company. Are they tied to bonuses, promotions or rewards? Who will they be shared with? Knowing the answers will give you insight into the tone you should take and how much effort is required.
* Ask yourself some hard questions and reply to them honestly.
* Don’t use your self-evaluation to bash your manager, your company or strategic direction, because this could come back to bite you later on. Employee remarks should be 90 percent positive comments and 10 percent 'areas for development' comments.
Use this 10 percent of the self-evaluation to explain your own plan to grow and develop in specific areas over the next year.
* Frame any shortcomings not as problems or things you did wrong, but as areas for development and improvement. It should appear more like an area where you want to learn more, do better and contribute at a higher level than a negative mark on your report card.
* Once you have outlined the areas where you would like to grow, it's a good idea to demonstrate a plan for how to get there. Use this as an opportunity to ask for whatever type of training could help you contribute more.
But there are steps you can take to ensure your self-evaluations help to advance your own career and provide valuable feedback to your organisation.
Here are a few tips that will come in handy for self-evaluation:
* Self-evaluation should not be focused only on your job, but also on your long term career plan.
From an employee perspective, if there is not a career plan in place, or if there is one but it’s not consistently followed, then it is time to discuss about your plans to your manager and make sure you both are in agreement.
* Mapping your accomplishments to business value is essential to a more meaningful self-assessment, especially if your company’s performance reviews have a direct effect on wage increases or bonuses.
* Approach your supervisor and ask how self-evaluations are used by the company. Are they tied to bonuses, promotions or rewards? Who will they be shared with? Knowing the answers will give you insight into the tone you should take and how much effort is required.
* Ask yourself some hard questions and reply to them honestly.
* Don’t use your self-evaluation to bash your manager, your company or strategic direction, because this could come back to bite you later on. Employee remarks should be 90 percent positive comments and 10 percent 'areas for development' comments.
Use this 10 percent of the self-evaluation to explain your own plan to grow and develop in specific areas over the next year.
* Frame any shortcomings not as problems or things you did wrong, but as areas for development and improvement. It should appear more like an area where you want to learn more, do better and contribute at a higher level than a negative mark on your report card.
* Once you have outlined the areas where you would like to grow, it's a good idea to demonstrate a plan for how to get there. Use this as an opportunity to ask for whatever type of training could help you contribute more.
* Cover the achievements you completed and be sure to include how and who it helped, as well as the impact on the business. Whether it's adding numbers to the bottom line or streamlining processes to create a better tech support workflow, using specifics makes sure everyone is on the same page and that you concisely tell the full story including the problem, the fix and the end results, instead of simply describing a deployment.
Believe it or not, there are businesses and managers out there who never offer feedback or performance reviews.
Courtesy: www.cio.com
