# 9 Self Evaluation Goals Examples You Can Adapt Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-evaluation-goals-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-evaluation-goals-examples.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 Nine self evaluation goals examples you can adapt, what makes each one hold up at the next review, and how to pick the two or three worth putting down. ## Key facts - Title: 9 Self Evaluation Goals Examples You Can Adapt - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Setting Goals - Primary keyword: self evaluation goals examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-evaluation-goals-examples/ ## What this page covers - Nine self evaluation goals examples you can adapt, what makes each one hold up at the next review, and how to pick the two or three worth putting down. - Practical guidance for self evaluation goals examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation Most [self evaluation forms](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-evaluation-for-work/) end with a section asking what you intend to work on next, and most people fill that part in last, in a hurry, with something borrowed. A self evaluation goal holds up when it names one specific thing you will do, states the evidence that will show whether you did it, sets a date, and has been talked through with your manager — because a goal your manager has not agreed to support is a goal that quietly disappears. That last condition is what the self evaluation goals examples in circulation almost always leave out. What follows is nine you can adapt, and why each survives being read back to you a year later. ## What makes a self evaluation goal hold up Every guide on this topic runs the same framework: [SMART](/knowledge/setting-goals/goal-setting-smart-goals/) — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The measurable and time-bound parts carry the weight, because the form is read by someone who will later judge whether you met the goal. A goal without a date and without something countable is not a weak goal; it is one nobody can assess, so at the next review it gets skipped. Specificity is the other half. Lattice's guidance on writing a strong self evaluation contrasts a claim of being efficient with a line like reducing processing time from five days to two by automating the intake workflow. The second version carries a baseline, an outcome, and the method that produced it — three things your manager can repeat to their own boss. The first is an adjective. Neither helps without material, which is where most people get stuck. Guidance from Culture Amp and Teamflect puts the same three inputs first: your job description, the goals set at the last cycle, and the feedback you received during the year. The review is judged against expectations set at the start of the period, not against whatever feels important now. ## 9 self evaluation goals examples you can adapt One warning first. Much of the goal material in circulation — the sets published by Terryberry, Careerminds, Dovetail, Smartsheet — is written for team leads: mentorship programs, delegation, internal promotion rates. If you do not manage anyone, copying those produces a goal you have no authority to deliver. The nine below assume you are an individual contributor. ### 1. A goal that closes a gap your manager already named Take a piece of [developmental feedback](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-receive-feedback/) you genuinely received this year and turn it into the goal, referring to the situation it came out of. This is the highest-credibility goal available, because the premise is already agreed: you are not proposing a problem, you are answering one your manager raised. Say what you will do differently and where it will be visible — a specific recurring meeting, a specific type of document. The version that fails thanks your manager for the feedback without committing to anything countable. ### 2. A before-and-after goal with a real baseline The Lattice pattern applied to your own work: name where the number sits today, where you intend it to sit, and the change that will move it. Cycle time, error rate, backlog size, turnaround on requests. This family works because the argument about whether you succeeded happens now, when you agree the baseline, rather than in twelve months from memory. It has one prerequisite — pull the current number while you still have access to it. ### 3. A visibility goal that makes finished work legible This one is about reporting, not producing. Early-career work is often invisible to anyone above your own manager, and the fix is a repeatable artifact rather than more effort: a monthly summary of what shipped, a shared tracker, a written handover at the end of each project. Set the cadence and the format as the goal. It also solves next year's version of this problem, since the self evaluation you write in twelve months gets assembled straight from it. ### 4. A communication goal with the measure agreed up front Communication is the most commonly set and most commonly unassessable goal on any form. It survives only if the proxy measure is fixed in advance. Careerminds pairs three completed communication workshops with a 90% positive effectiveness rating in team surveys inside six months. You do not need that exact shape — a named presentation, a document type you will own, a count of meetings you will run all work. What fails is agreeing to improve and settling it by opinion later. ### 5. A goal that asks your manager for something Training budget, a place on a specific project, a stretch assignment, protected time. Indeed's guidance is explicit that development goals should be discussed with your manager during the review, precisely so they align with the organization's goals and come with the resources to hit them. The self evaluation is the one meeting of the year where your development is the agenda item, so it is the natural place to put the request on the record. Write the ask into the goal. ### 6. A scope goal that names the specific work Not "take on more responsibility" — name the process you want to own, the meeting you want to run, the decision you want authority to make without checking first. Vague ambition reads as restlessness; a named handover reads as a plan your manager can agree to or counter. This matters most for individual contributors, since the published examples in this family nearly all assume a title you do not have yet. ### 7. A knowledge goal tied to what it will let you do Product knowledge, a tool, a certification. Indeed lists maximizing product knowledge through regular training among the most commonly set employee goals, and it is easy to write badly by anchoring it to the credential rather than the work. The version that holds up states what you will be able to do afterward that you cannot do now: handle a category of request without escalating, run an analysis you currently wait on someone else for. ### 8. A workload goal written as a system, not a promise Missed deadlines and overload get written as intentions to try harder, and intentions cannot be reviewed. The reviewable version names the practice: how you will clarify what is actually being asked when a request arrives, how your list gets ordered each morning, what you check before agreeing to a deadline. Time management appears on every published list of common goal areas, which is why it is the one most often written generically. ### 9. One weakness, with its plan attached Choose a single real gap and state it in solution-oriented language. The phrasing shift recurring across Deel's and Pin's example sets is from an admission of failure to naming the area you are focused on improving and the plan you are following. That is worth taking seriously, because the fear here — that naming a weakness hands your manager ammunition — has it backwards. An unaddressed gap is what does damage; a gap with a dated plan beside it reads as someone already managing it. ## Choosing which two or three go on the form Do not use all nine. These sources converge on narrowing to two or three priority competencies, for a practical reason: recurring check-ins are only possible against a short list, and a self evaluation listing eight goals reads as having none. A workable mix is one goal aimed at output you control, one aimed at something that has genuinely come up in your feedback, and one development goal. Then close the section with how progress gets tracked — which [one-on-one](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/one-on-one-meeting-with-manager/), what cadence, what you will both look at. Naming the tracking mechanism is what converts an intention into something your manager can support rather than merely note. The hard part is not the wording. It is ranking your own skills against each other well enough to know which two deserve the year, and most people have never had that ranked for them. If you are guessing, it is worth getting [a scored skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you commit — a goal chosen against evidence beats one chosen because it came to mind first. ## Why some people find this section easy to write Two people can put the same sentence on the same form and get very different years out of it. What separates them happened before the form was opened, and it shows up in what they were able to say honestly once they got there. **Working with Your Manager** is what turns a submitted goal into an agreed one. The people who do this well treat the relationship as a partnership rather than a submission: they come prepared, keep results visible through the year instead of reconstructing them the week before, argue for goals that are demanding but genuinely reachable, and get clear on how much decision-making authority a goal carries. They also stay future-focused, treating the review as where next year gets set rather than where last year gets relitigated — and they ask for what they want, which is how a goal arrives with support attached. **Building Self-Awareness** is what makes any of it honest. Naming a strength means separating what you are genuinely good at from what you are merely competent at, and naming a gap means having taken in the developmental feedback that arrived in passing during the year, not just the verdict delivered at the review. The habit that helps is to receive feedback, add your own perspective, then reflect — rather than defending in the moment. It also stops you spending twelve months on a weakness nobody but you was worried about. **Setting Goals** works a level above the form. It asks what the goals are for: whether the coming year sits in work that plays to your strengths rather than patching every weakness, whether the horizon is short enough to stay realistic, and whether any of this is yours rather than adopted to satisfy someone else. Goals that come from outside you tend to burn a review cycle without changing anything. None of these is a fixed trait — each is a habit, built the way any other work habit is. A short assessment will show you where yours stand across all twelve of the work skills this framework covers, which is the useful thing to know here: not only how this review goes, but [which ones matter most](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) in the role after this one. ## Where this leaves you If you already keep a note of what you delivered, or ask your manager what they made of something while it is still fresh, parts of this will read as familiar rather than new. You are also reading about the goals section before it is due, which is more attention than that box usually gets. None of these skills asks you to become a different person at work; a gap in one is something not yet learned rather than something fixed. What does change is how much they carry. The further you go, the less your goals look like an HR exercise and the more they decide what you get trusted with and how your work is described when you are not in the room. So the useful move now is an honest picture of your starting point. That picture is what the Job Skills Test gives you. It is a **free** self-assessment of the twelve work skills this article keeps circling — the manager relationship, the read on your own strengths, the sense of what you want the work to add up to — and it tells you which are already working for you and which would repay a year of attention. That is a better basis for the goals section than any list of examples: instead of adapting a goal because it sounded right, you would choose one against evidence. The only thing left is to see where yours stand. ## 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? Nine self evaluation goals examples you can adapt, what makes each one hold up at the next review, and how to pick the two or three worth putting down. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Setting Goals. ### 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/setting-goals.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-evaluation-goals-examples/ Preferred summary: "Nine self evaluation goals examples you can adapt, what makes each one hold up at the next review, and how to pick the two or three worth putting down." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.