It is this time of the year again, writing annual self assessment. It is due today before midnight. But from last week, everyone was using it as an excuse to claim themselves busy; it seemed like a big deal - our pay increase is dependent on it. How hard could it be right? I knew what I was going to write, it will probably take me a few hours, but I still started it last Monday to give myself ample time to finish. I finished it as planned, it took me an hour since I have more accomplishments this year to write about. I proof read it a few times to make sure it is all polished. Click, submit at US EST 1330 this afternoon :-)
I did very well last year, maybe it was because I wrote a fascinating assessment or just the fact that I accomplished so much. Also, I got rewarded fairly last year. I always had the intention to write more and more trying to claim more credits. I used to do that, and I fixed this bad habit last year, not to mention there is a 2000 character limit for assessment on each objective.
My evaluation system is composed of three objectives, it intends to cover different aspects of my work and attempts to evaluate me in a well-rounded manner. Leadership is my first objective trying to measure how well I managed my team and how effective the team's productivity is. Communication and horizontal integration is my second objective. You can ask five different people what that is and get eight different answers. In a nutshell, it tries to measure my ability to communicate with people and how well I manage technical issues and drive them to resolution. Third and last, the objective is personal development. I guess my organization wants to make sure I am not just doing a job, but at the same time, I am proactively enhancing my career through different means.
Kudos to me because I already built a template from last year. When I first wrote my assessment last year, I wrote it like a resume. I bulleted every single thing I worked on, things include a major project, a small project, talking to people, attending meetings, writing documents and etc. You usually realize how bad your stuff is after you write them, sounds familiar? After I was done, I barely read it through myself, it was so disorganized and sounded like I was ranting. I showed a friend of mine to get some feedback, his comment was "So what!" His comment shocked me, in a good way of course. He is right, who cares what I did, perhaps other people can do the same thing. Everyone can attend meetings, everyone can talk to people; but how well and what difference did I make?
After reading through countless self assessment examples and suggestions online, I came across this article that stated something that just hit the spot. Paraphrasing here, your boss wants to know what you did, curious about how you did it but really cares about its impact. This immediately led to my idea of the three-tier template.
Select all, and erase. I started from scratch again and I spent less than 10 minutes for each objective. I then went online and searched for some polishing words and tried to spice it up a little bit. I read it again, I asked my friend to read it again. It was smooth, well organized and made it sounds like I actually did something important.
Why can't we write a resume like that? I think resume serves a different purpose, it act as a quick "gotcha" for your readers just like a 15-second elevator speech. If you run into your director or vice president in the elevator and you only got 15 seconds, what would you say to impress them? A resume is supposed to send a few quick bullets of your accomplishments to the reader, and try to correlate as much as possible to the job itself. It is like a strobe light, a quick flash and catch someone's attention and save all the beautiful stories for later - interview.
But how? In my personal opinion, the choice of verbs and eliminate ambiguity of the subject (your work accomplished). Try to consider these four verbs: lead, developed, drafted and participated. If you were to rank them in terms of credibility, how would you rank them? I already ranked them in sequential order. I suggest to avoid ambiguous subjects which means do not allow your reader to think about what it is. "Developed a statement of work for investment plan." What kind of investment plan? Are you asking someone to invest a dollar or a million dollars? I think amplifying the scope of investment plan will earn you some positive points. For example, "developed a statement of work for a multi-million dollar advertisement investment plan and obtained excellent customer feedback."
Writing an annual assessment in my mind needs a different approach, it is suppose to capture a year worth of work, accomplishment and value. I find the three-tier template very useful - what I did, how I did it and its impact.
To summarize, resume is supposed to be concise, eye catching, simple and unambiguous where as annual assessment should be well structured, methodical, value based and should trace back to overarching organization goal.
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