What is a Self Assessment?

Self assessment in the business world can refer to your opportunity to contribute to reviews of your work performance. The ability to accurately self-assess may help you to advocate for better pay, promotions, or to gauge the areas in which you need to improve before asking for such things. Your self assessment should be well written and emphasize your strong points or contributions to your work, but it should also be realistic.

Many companies conduct reviews on an annual or semi-annual basis. They don’t always ask employees to use self assessment, or they may guide the self assessment with specific questions to help employees decide how to answer. Many reviews, if they don’t include a self assessment portion, do give you the opportunity to sign in agreement of the review, and offer you space for commentary and the option of not signing if you feel something was not fairly reviewed. Unless you have a very significant beef with your company about a review, not signing can be a mistake when not accompanied by a reasoned self review.

If a self assessment corrects part of a review it should not do so in an accusatory fashion. Instead, use qualifying words to gently correct a supervisor. For example, if you’re in sales you might be rated on your percentage of sales per customer. If you have been rated incorrectly, something you should keep track of for your own reference, you might make the following statement: “ I believe that my ratio of closing 89 sales per 100 customers was slightly inaccurate. My records show a rate of 95 sales per 100 customers.”

Companies may ask an employee to fill out a self assessments prior to a review being written and filed. Again it helps to keep records of your performance, especially in those areas the company values most. If you are a manufacturer, you might be able to state that you completed certain tasks with a high percentage (know the percentage when you can) of accuracy. Letting an employer know that you’ve performed a job in less than the time it required can also be an asset. List any contributions you’ve made that go above and beyond your job, like volunteering for company projects, getting extra training, training others, or running teams.

Always try to correlate any additional tasks with success rate. If you ran a safety team, you might be able to state that your team helped reduce the accident or work injury rate in the company by a certain percentage. These things can matter, because they save your company money. Listing special training opportunities are important because they prove you have become a more valuable employee.

Self assessment forms may also require you to list areas in which you need to improve. Be careful when answering these types of questions. Try to turn any negatives into positives when you can. For instance if you had trouble getting to work on time for the first few months of the year, you can mention it, and then explain how you resolved the issue, and why it is no longer a problem. If you made a mistake on something, you can emphasize how it taught you to be more cautious or skilled at your job and resulted in better work performance. Try to keep answers truthful, but spin them so that the employer understands how mistakes or problems have contributed to making you a better employee, or how you have set new goals to improve your performance.

When you can, type your self assessment and check it carefully for spelling errors or grammatical problems. Since the employer is looking at your written account, what and how you write suddenly represents you. Clearly thought out self-reviews that are well written are likely to be taken into consideration more than illegible and misspelled ones.