# Self Assessment Examples for Work That Your Manager Can Use Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-assessment-examples-for-work/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-assessment-examples-for-work.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving working with your manager at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Self assessment examples for work built from eight formats - STAR, XYZ and more - that turn what you actually did into sentences your manager can quote. ## Key facts - Title: Self Assessment Examples for Work That Your Manager Can Use - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Communication - Primary keyword: self assessment examples for work - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-assessment-examples-for-work/ ## What this page covers - Self assessment examples for work built from eight formats - STAR, XYZ and more - that turn what you actually did into sentences your manager can quote. - Practical guidance for self assessment examples for work - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation Almost nobody finds this box easy, which is why most people go looking for wording before they go looking for material. But the self assessment examples for work that are worth anything are not sentences to paste in — they are formats. Each one takes something you actually did and turns it into a statement with an outcome attached: the work, the action, and the change you can point to. Your own material fills in the rest. Eight formats cover nearly every box on [a standard review form](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/employee-review/), including the two that most people leave thin. ## Eight self assessment examples for work, and the format behind each Pick the format that matches the box in front of you, then substitute your own project names, dates, and figures. What makes an entry land is never the phrasing — it is whether a reader who was not there can tell what happened. ### 1. STAR: situation, task, action, result Deel and Culture Amp both point to the STAR method — situation, task, action, result — as the frame that keeps a self-assessment grounded in evidence rather than adjectives. You set the context, say what you were responsible for, say what you did, and close with what came of it. The fourth beat does the work; the first three are setup. Use STAR for the one or two pieces of work you most want counted, because at four beats it is too long to repeat all the way down a form. A useful side effect: it is the same structure used in behavioral interviews, so anything you write here is reusable later. ### 2. The XYZ formula: accomplished X, as measured by Y, by doing Z When you need several entries rather than one, Deel offers the shorter alternative: accomplished X, as measured by Y, by doing Z. It is STAR with the setup stripped out, and it forces a measurement into the middle of the sentence where you cannot skip past it. Rippling's worked example runs "I reduced processing time from 5 days to 2 days by automating the intake workflow." Pin describes the same shape at word level — an outcome verb (reduced, exceeded, delivered, implemented), a specific quantifier (by X%, from X to Y, across N stakeholders), and a competency noun such as accountability or initiative. Choose the verb first and the rest tends to follow. ### 3. I demonstrated [behavior] when I [example] For forms that rate you against named competencies, Indeed recommends a sentence that states the behavior and immediately pays for it: I demonstrated [behavior] when I [example]. Its own examples include "I demonstrated initiative when I wrote three additional blog posts this quarter" and "I displayed leadership skills by leading the engineering team through a feature release." It works because it never leaves a claim standing alone — the evidence arrives in the same breath, before the reader has a chance to discount the adjective. It is also the quickest format here, which makes it the right one for boxes asking for three or four examples each. ### 4. Before and after, when the work produced no numbers Not all work comes with figures, and inventing them is worse than having none. Where nothing was measured, describe the state before and the state after, or the change in scope: what was undocumented that is now written down, what needed three people and now needs one, what used to arrive late and no longer does. Culture Amp's contrast sets the standard — "I contributed to the team's success" against "I led the Q3 onboarding redesign, cutting new-hire ramp time from 6 weeks to 4 weeks for 8 hires." The second entry is stronger because it is checkable, not because it contains a number. A checkable before and after clears the same bar. ### 5. Your employer's own competency wording PerformYard's advice is to look at the competencies your organization actually evaluates against and mirror that language in your entries — and, where your scale separates "Meets Expectations" from "Exceeds Expectations," to write so the reader can see which side of that line you are on. This is the least intuitive format on the list and one of the most effective, because it removes a translation step your manager would otherwise have to perform on your behalf. It has one limit worth knowing. A competency list is your employer's vocabulary for your job, not a full map of the skills your work runs on, and the strengths that fall outside it are the ones people find [hardest to name](/knowledge/setting-goals/strengths-and-weaknesses/). If that is where you stall, it helps to [get language for your own strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you start filling boxes, so what you write is true rather than merely available. ### 6. The 70/30 balance, decided before you draft Set the ratio in advance instead of discovering it afterward. Culture Amp puts the credible split at roughly 70–80% strengths and 20–30% [a genuine growth area](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/goals-for-performance-review/), paired with what you are doing about it; Lattice arrives at the same place from the other side, noting that an assessment reads as self-aware only when both halves are present. Choosing first prevents both failure modes: an unbroken run of praise, which a reader discounts on sight, and one honest admission that expands until it colors the entire document. Deel notes most self-assessments run one to three pages, so the ratio is a real constraint on space, not an abstraction. ### 7. The growth area written as a plan This is the box people leave thin, and it has a shape: name the difficulty plainly, give the context without arguing your way out of it, say what you changed, and say what you will do differently from the start next time. The worked version that recurs across self-evaluation guides runs along these lines — struggling with [competing deadlines](/knowledge/time-management/prioritize-tasks/) during two simultaneous launches, flagging it, building a priority tracking system, delivering more consistently over the following two quarters, and committing to use that system from the beginning of the next one rather than in response to trouble. Four beats, one of which is a result. Written that way, the box reads as a plan rather than a confession. ### 8. The cliché swap The last format is subtractive. Pin and Rippling name the same offenders — hard worker, team player, goes above and beyond, wore many hats — on the grounds that they turn up in thousands of reviews and give a reader nothing to weigh. Pin's blunt illustration is that "I am a strong collaborator" tells the reviewer nothing at all. Make a final pass and cut any sentence that would fit unchanged into a stranger's self-assessment, then rebuild it with one of the formats above. PerformYard explains why the pass is worth the time: this is one of the few moments in a year when you control how your own performance gets documented. ## What a self-assessment actually asks of you Read back over those eight formats and notice how little of the difficulty ever sat in the writing. Deciding what counts as evidence, judging what your manager needs to see, choosing which weakness to name and which request to make — the sentence is the last step, and the shortest. **Working with Your Manager** carries most of this. A self-assessment is not a verdict handed to you; it is your input into a rating that has not been written yet, which is why preparing properly, making results visible instead of assuming they were noticed, keeping the growth section future-focused, and asking outright for what you want next all change what comes back. The form is one moment inside an ongoing working partnership, not the only conversation you get in a year. **Building Self-Awareness** is what fills the two boxes that stall people, because both ask for self-knowledge rather than writing skill. Naming what you are genuinely good at — not merely competent at — comes from asking yourself concrete questions about how you work, how it feels, and what results follow. The same skill decides whether the evaluative feedback that comes back afterward lands as information you can use or as a verdict on your worth. **Communication** covers the part you came looking for. A self-assessment is a written, documented, one-way message, which is exactly where the ordinary rules of writing at work bite hardest: state the main point first, be brief, be clear and direct, keep it positive. That is the real reason "hard worker" fails. It is not too modest; it is neither specific nor informative. None of the three is specific to review season — they are the same behaviors that decide how the rest of the year goes, which is why it is worth knowing where each of yours currently stands. The free Work Skills Test measures **twelve work skills**, these three among them, and reads forward rather than backward, so you can [see which of these are thin](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and decide what to build next instead of learning it from a rating. A low score is not a ceiling; it marks something nobody has taught you yet. ## What this changes beyond the form You may recognize one or two of these formats as things you already do without calling them anything — the instinct to attach a number, or to say what changed rather than what you were like. That instinct is most of the skill; the formats above only make it repeatable. What sits underneath it is not a fixed quality. Selecting evidence, judging an audience, asking for what you want next — these are learned, and they are learned without becoming a different person at work. The material stays yours; only the shape of the sentence is borrowed. They also compound. Every cycle where you can point at what you did, rather than hope it was noticed, means the next conversation about your work starts further along — which counts for more as the decisions attached to it grow. You have already done the part most people skip: you came looking for how the sentences work, not just for sentences. ## Find out what you are working with The formats are the easy half; the material has to come from you. And there is one input the form never asks for and cannot supply — a clear read on which of your work skills are strong right now and which are quietly costing you. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. It scores you across all twelve and shows which ones would repay attention first — concrete enough to put behind your growth-area entry and your goals for the next cycle, and still useful long after this review closes. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and about seven minutes from start to results.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Self assessment examples for work built from eight formats - STAR, XYZ and more - that turn what you actually did into sentences your manager can quote. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Communication. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-assessment-examples-for-work/ Preferred summary: "Self assessment examples for work built from eight formats - STAR, XYZ and more - that turn what you actually did into sentences your manager can quote." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.