# Self Performance Appraisal Examples: What to Write When the Form Is Due Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-performance-appraisal-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-performance-appraisal-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 Self performance appraisal examples plus what to write in each section - accomplishments, weaknesses and goals - when you kept no notes and the form is due. ## Key facts - Title: Self Performance Appraisal Examples: What to Write When the Form Is Due - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Influence - Primary keyword: self performance appraisal examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-performance-appraisal-examples/ ## What this page covers - Self performance appraisal examples plus what to write in each section - accomplishments, weaknesses and goals - when you kept no notes and the form is due. - Practical guidance for self performance appraisal examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation The form is open, the deadline is this week, and the box asking what you achieved this year is still blank. A self performance appraisal is your written account of what you did during the review period, how well you did it, and what you want next. Useful examples are the ones you adapt — your project, your result, your words — rather than phrases copied whole. Nearly everyone arrives at this form the same way: fairly sure they did good work, unable to remember most of it, and wary of sounding either boastful or incompetent. That is a solvable problem, and it is not really a writing problem. ## What is a self performance appraisal actually for? It is not a verdict and it is not a test you pass. Guidance from UAB's human resources team describes the self-evaluation as the starting point for a discussion with your manager — an input, not a conclusion. That changes what belongs in it. Anything you would be willing to say out loud in the review meeting belongs. Anything you would not say out loud does not, because you will be asked about it. Your manager is drafting their own assessment in parallel, and yours arrives first, which means it shapes what they go looking for. Treat it as the opening move in a conversation about the coming year rather than paperwork to clear. ## Can I just copy self performance appraisal examples? Use them for shape, not for content. The big example lists — HiBob's 79-plus, PerformYard's 110, ThriveSparrow's 180-plus — are all built the same way: sample sentences sorted by competency. They are generic by construction, which is the exact problem those same articles warn about. Lattice puts the contrast plainly: "I am a strong collaborator" tells a reviewer nothing, while "I contributed to three cross-functional projects this year and received positive peer feedback" tells them exactly what you mean. Rippling names the filler to cut outright — hard worker, team player, go above and beyond, wore many hats — on the grounds that these appear in thousands of reviews and carry nothing measurable. So read the examples to learn the sentence pattern, then replace every word of the content with your own. ## What do I write if I can't remember what I did all year? Rebuild the year from records instead of memory. Culture Amp's point is that the strongest self-evaluations come from people who kept notes and tracked their work against their goals as they went — which is exactly why you are stuck in the last week with nothing written down. You can still reconstruct it. Work backward through your calendar, your sent mail, your ticket queue or project board, and the files you created, month by month, and write a plain list of everything you touched. Most people find considerably more than they expected. One thing tends to surface in that list: it is full of tasks and thin on what you are actually good at. If that gap looks familiar, it helps to [name your actual strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you write a word — spotting them is a skill in its own right, and one you can build. ## How specific do I have to be — do I need numbers for everything? No, but you do need a result. The structure recommended across these guides is STAR — situation, task, action, result — borrowed from interview coaching, and its value here is that it forces the result element most submissions leave out. It also turns a claim about your character into a claim about an event, which your manager can check against their own memory. Plenty of jobs never produce clean numbers. When yours does not, the result is still nameable: what changed, who stopped being blocked, what stopped going wrong. "The handover notes cut the questions coming from the night shift" is specific without a percentage anywhere in it. ## How do I write about my accomplishments without sounding like I'm bragging? Report events, not adjectives. Nasdaq's piece on self-evaluations makes the point that many workers downplay their accomplishments for fear of seeming boastful, and that they should list what they do best precisely to keep those achievements on the manager's radar. Your audience here is essentially one person whose memory of your year is partial and weighted toward the last few months. Leaving something out is not modesty; it is information your reviewer simply never receives. Bragging is an adjective with no event behind it. "I led the migration and it closed two weeks ahead of the date" is not a boast, it is a fact, and facts do not sound arrogant. Where a win was shared, say so — the credit does not shrink. ## Should I be honest about my weaknesses, or will it hurt my rating? Be honest, and bring the plan with it. Nasdaq names the fear exactly: people worry that listing a weakness will reveal something their manager had not noticed, so they answer insincerely — and it argues the opposite, that honest self-reflection signals authenticity, which employers value. The pattern the guides recommend, at Deel and Culture Amp alike, is to name the area and then name what you are doing about it, rather than stating a failure and stopping there. There is a mechanism under that advice worth knowing. A weakness you raised yourself, and are visibly already working on, is far more credible than silence — and it is what makes the strong claims elsewhere on the same page believable. ## What do I write if I had a bad year or missed my goals? Name it, then narrow it. The guides are consistent that a self-evaluation listing only achievements and one listing only shortcomings both fail, because the document is read as evidence of your judgment as much as your output. Someone who cannot assess their own work accurately is a different problem from someone who had a hard year. So write what happened, what you would do differently, and what has already changed since. A missed goal with a clear account behind it reads better than a strong quarter described vaguely. ## What should go in the goals or "areas for development" section? Something you actually want. Indeed's guidance is to close the self-evaluation by voicing your ambitions, so the organization knows where you want to go and can help you get there. This is the one point in the year when a request from you lands in writing in front of the person who allocates the work. Use it for something concrete: a project you want on, a skill you want time to build, a piece of scope you want to own. Vague development goals — communicate better, get more organized — give your manager nothing to act on, so nothing happens. ## What happens after I submit it? Your manager reads it while writing their own assessment, and the two meet in the review conversation. That is why this document matters more than its length suggests: it sets the agenda. Points you raised get discussed, and points you left out usually do not. Take notes in the meeting, and if you asked for something in the development section, come back to it a few weeks later — a request nobody revisits quietly expires. ## The skills doing the work behind a good self appraisal Read those answers together and the wording problem shrinks. Almost none of them turn on phrasing. They turn on having evidence, judging how you are being read, and being willing to ask for something — and each of those is a behavior you practice, not a trait you were handed. **Working with Your Manager** carries most of the weight here. The self appraisal is your best annual chance to make results visible to the person who rates them, and the same skill covers preparing properly, shaping how you are evaluated, staying future-focused, and asking for what you want next. Handled that way, the form stops being an administrative chore and becomes the opening move in a working partnership, one where your goals and the content of your job are things you help set. **Building Self-Awareness** supplies the material every example sentence needs. It is the habit of asking what you are genuinely good at, how you work, and what results followed — and, on the receiving end, of taking your manager's assessment in properly: understand it first, add your own view, then reflect on it. That is also what lets you put a real weakness on the page rather than a safe one. **Influence** is what the document is doing whether you intend it or not: a short, evidence-led case, read by someone who decides something afterward. Keeping it simple, leading with concrete examples, and naming a drawback yourself instead of hiding it all belong to it — as does following up on what you asked for once the review closes. None of the three is a personality you either have or you don't. They are behaviors, they are running all year, and the appraisal only makes them visible for an afternoon. They also sit alongside nine others that a **free 7-minute Job Skills Test** covers in one pass, so you can [see where all twelve stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than waiting for the next review to tell you. Some of this may already describe how you work. The person who keeps a running note of what they shipped, or who says the slightly awkward true thing in the review because it is true, is not doing anything exotic. If that is not you yet, it is not a fixed fact about you either — every part of it is learnable, and you can build it without turning into someone else at work. What happens otherwise is quiet rather than dramatic: this kind of skill counts for more as your responsibilities grow, and the distance between what you did and what anyone knows you did gets wider each year — which is precisely the gap a short skills check closes early. You did not type something into the box to get it off your desk. You went looking for how to do it properly, which is the part most people skip. All that is left is knowing where you stand. ## Find out which of these you already have Before you write the next appraisal, it is worth knowing which of these skills is already strong and which one is quietly holding the rest back. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of the twelve work skills this article has been circling — the manager relationship, self-awareness, influence, and nine more. It takes 7 minutes, it asks how you actually work rather than what you know, and it scores each skill so you can see which ones are solid and which one would change the most if you built it. If your appraisal is due this week, the results give you something concrete to write from. If it is months away, you have the whole period to work on what they show. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, and your results appear the moment you finish.* ## 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 performance appraisal examples plus what to write in each section - accomplishments, weaknesses and goals - when you kept no notes and the form is due. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Influence. ### 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/influence.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-performance-appraisal-examples/ Preferred summary: "Self performance appraisal examples plus what to write in each section - accomplishments, weaknesses and goals - when you kept no notes and the form is due." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.