5 Simple Steps to Write an Effective Self-Review

How to write your self-review like a pro!

Feb 15, 2024

Hello friend! 👋

Basma here. Thank you for reading An Engineer's Echo, your weekly publication of stories to equip you with the soft and hard skills to fast-track your growth in software engineering.

Read Time: 4 mins.

Self-reviews can feel daunting, especially if you’re like me, and don’t regularly update your progress document. I plan to write mine soon and thought to organize my thoughts and share my plan. So, let's get to it...

Step #1: Use Your Company’s Level Framework

Prepare a draft document outside of the feedback form you'll submit.

For promotion seekers, utilize the next level’s criteria. For others, stick to your current level’s criteria.

Outline the headlines of all relevant level criteria.
Write these criteria as titles.
Beneath each title, jot down bullet points detailing your work. (We'll cover how to gather this in the following steps.)

Step #2: Review Your Work History and Peer Feedback

Collect your work history for the current performance review cycle, spanning the past 6 months to a year.

Utilize tools like Jira, Slack, or Github to search for all assigned tickets within the specified period.
Document the links and provide brief descriptions under the respective headlines in your draft.
Refer to the draft from Step #1 to understand what "impactful" entails.
Consider Peer Feedback:
- Incorporate any feedback or testimonials received from colleagues or others, showcasing appreciation for your work.

Tailor the tools mentioned to suit your needs: Not all companies use the same tools. And, you don’t have to use all of them to get your work history.

Step #3 Highlight the things you’re still working on

As much as we like to believe it (myself included), we don’t do everything right.

In self-reviews, we need to give ourselves constructive feedback too.

Self-review is not just about what you did right. It’s also about how you are looking to improve in the future. What’s your plan? And how you are going to execute it.

For this, outline:

Areas still requiring development.
Activities you aim to increase.
Tasks you aim to decrease.
Draw inspiration from:
- Personal aspirations and goals.
- Plans discussed with your manager.
- Constructive peer feedback.
- Headlines from level criteria where you lack strong examples.

Step #4: Refine Your Draft

If you have too many things you've done, pick the most important ones that match your level's standards.

Choose 1 or 2 examples for each standard.
Keep descriptions short, using only a sentence or two.
Cut out anything that's not important.
Keep sentences short and simple.
List everything with bullet points.
Pick your best examples.

If you're unsure what to do, keep reading the next step.

Step #5: Use ChatGPT to Help with Editing

I love ChatGPT, it makes my life a lot easier with text editing (using the right prompting.)

Your self-review is like any other written document, and the people reading it have very limited time.

So, you need to:

Improve recognition for your work, and make it easier for managers.
Share your accomplishments clearly in your self-review.
Simplify the review process for your managers.

To do this, your self-review needs to be:

Simple.
Concise.
Easy to read format.

Here’s the prompt I use to make ChatGPT edit my self-review:

I am a software engineer. I want you to help me write my self-review.
I will give you text, I want you to remove any fluff or repitions, use short sentences, use direct and simple language, don’t change the original tone of voice, and use bullet points.

You can refine it to suit your taste.

Bonus: Review It With Someone

I find it beneficial for me to review my self-review with someone. Thankfully, my kind tech lead (who’s probably reading this) offered to review mine with him.

Why review it with someone?

They may catch things you've missed.
They can help you focus on what's most impactful.
Reviewing it with your manager is also helpful. They'll evaluate you based on it.

I'll review mine with my manager soon too!

Good luck with your self-review, whether you're about to write it or have already done so!

If you've found the steps I mentioned helpful or have any other tips, feel free to share them in the comments below.

I'm excited to hear more about your experiences and tips!

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