# Self Review for Work: Examples for Every Section of the Form Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-review-for-work-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-review-for-work-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 review for work examples for every section of the form: accomplishments, goals, challenges, growth areas and what to ask for next, with real evidence. ## Key facts - Title: Self Review for Work: Examples for Every Section of the Form - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Influence - Primary keyword: self review for work examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-review-for-work-examples/ ## What this page covers - Self review for work examples for every section of the form: accomplishments, goals, challenges, growth areas and what to ask for next, with real evidence. - Practical guidance for self review for work examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation The form is open, the deadline is Friday, and the box under key accomplishments has been empty for twenty minutes. A self review for work asks for roughly the same six things wherever you work: what you achieved and why it mattered, how you tracked against the goals you were set, obstacles you worked through, skills you built, where you want to improve, and what you want next. The examples worth copying are structures rather than sentences — name the work, state what changed, connect it to something your team actually needed. What makes the box hard is almost never vocabulary. It is that the year has already happened and none of it was written down. ## Start with evidence, not with wording Search this topic and you get phrase banks competing on volume — 79-plus examples from HiBob, 70-plus sample answers from Deel, 110 from PerformYard, 180-plus from ThriveSparrow — all sorted by competency heading. There is a contradiction sitting inside them. The same guides that hand you "I have excellent communication skills" also warn you off "hard worker," "team player," "go above and beyond" and "wore many hats," on the grounds that those phrases turn up in thousands of reviews and measure nothing. Both halves are right. A borrowed sentence is only worth anything as a shape you pour your own material into. So the first move is not writing. Lattice, Culture Amp and Indeed all put the same step ahead of drafting: go back through your calendar, your project tool, your sent mail, and any feedback you kept, and rebuild the year before you try to describe it. Half an hour of that turns a blank page into an editing job, which is a far easier problem. ## Self review for work: examples for each section of the form ### 1. Key accomplishments and their impact The core entry. Lattice and Indeed both recommend STAR — situation, task, action, result — because it forces the result line, which is the line most people leave out. The pattern that recurs across the sample banks is initiative, change, scope: something close to "I led the Q3 onboarding redesign, cutting new-hire ramp time from six weeks to four for eight new starters." Notice how little of that is adjective. If your work does not produce numbers, name the change anyway — the report that now arrives before the meeting instead of after it, the handover that stopped needing a call. ### 2. Progress against the goals you were set The [objectives agreed at the start](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/appraisal-goals/) of the period are the reference point, not your general memory of the year. They define what success was supposed to look like, which is why several guides recommend opening them before you write a word. Cover all of them, including the one you missed. A goal you did not reach, with an honest sentence about what got in the way, reads as an accurate narrator; a review that quietly omits it invites your manager to raise it instead, on their terms rather than yours. ### 3. Obstacles you worked through Standard self-reflection templates list this section alongside accomplishments, and it is the one most often left thin. It is where constraints outside your control get onto the record without turning into excuses. Name the difficulty, name what you did about it, and be plain about the ones that are still unresolved. The reader may have had [no visibility into any of it](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-write-email-to-manager-regarding-updates/) — a deliverable that looks routine from outside looks different once they know the brief changed twice and the date did not move. ### 4. Working with other people Describe a specific piece of coordination rather than claiming to be collaborative. Whose work did you unblock, what did you share that someone else would otherwise have rebuilt, which recurring problem stopped happening once you started doing something differently. Sample answers in this section drift toward self-description — "I foster open communication" — and self-description is exactly what the avoid-lists were written about. Credit belongs here too, attached to real work rather than offered as a gesture. ### 5. Communication Name the artifact or the habit, then what it prevented for other people. A representative improvement entry runs close to "I need to improve [my follow-up](/knowledge/influence/follow-up-after-a-meeting/) so tasks and decisions are clearly understood by all parties" — which only means something if a real instance sits behind it. Tone matters more in this box than in any other: the consistent advice across these guides is clear, concise and professional, with no attempt to guess what your manager wants to hear. ### 6. Skills you strengthened during the period This section is about you rather than your output: what you can do now that you could not do twelve months ago, and where you applied it. It is the box early-career writers most often leave blank, usually because progress in how you work is real but never logged anywhere. That is a recall problem rather than a modesty problem, and it is fixable — it takes about seven minutes to [see which skills have moved](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), which is a more reliable starting point than trying to reconstruct the change from memory. ### 7. Areas you want to improve The section people dread is, across every source here, one of the strongest things you can put on the page — provided the admission comes with a plan attached. Deel and Culture Amp converge on the same pattern: not "I failed at X" but the gap, the remedy, and a timeframe, along the lines of needing to prioritize better and having already booked the course to do something about it. Balance is treated as a criterion in itself. A review listing only wins, or only shortcomings, is described as missing the point regardless of how well either half is written, because what your manager is reading for is judgment. Pick one or two real gaps rather than a catalog, and skip the humblebrag about caring too much — it fools nobody who has read more than three of these. ### 8. What you want next, and what you need to get there The closing section is the only place in the document where [asking outright](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-ask-for-a-promotion/) is expected. Name the responsibilities, the type of work, or the exposure you want in the coming period, and name the support that would make it possible — access, time, a specific project, someone to learn from. Guides describe this as voicing your ambitions so the organization can help you reach them. Be concrete: "more responsibility" gives your manager nothing to act on, while a named project starting next quarter gives them something they can actually say yes to. ## The skills that make this form easier to fill in Look back at what those eight boxes actually asked of you. Not one of them asked for better wording. They asked you to remember your own year accurately, to judge your own work honestly, and to make it legible to someone who was not standing next to you while you did it — and those are practiced things, not fixed ones. **Working with Your Manager** reframes the document. It is not a form to complete correctly; it is your scheduled input into an evaluation someone else has to write and then defend upstairs. Most of the outcome was set before the form opened — by results you made visible as you went and expectations you agreed on rather than assumed — and the part this skill adds now is preparation: influencing your own assessment, keeping it future-focused, and asking for what you want while the conversation is open. **Building Self-Awareness** is what sections one and seven are really testing. Naming a genuine strength, as opposed to something you are merely competent at, takes deliberate self-evaluation, and so does naming a gap without either minimizing it or turning it into a confession. The same skill governs what happens when the rating comes back: understanding the feedback first, adding your own view, then reflecting — rather than defending in the moment or swallowing a judgment whole. **Influence** explains why the honest version of section seven works. Your reader needs evidence they can repeat in a room you are not in, so leading with concrete examples beats leading with claims, and voluntarily naming a drawback buys credibility for everything else on the page. That is the opposite of spin. It rests on the slower thing underneath it — a reputation built by delivering consistently and being known for something specific — which is what the form is trying to record in the first place. None of this has to be guesswork: a free 7-minute assessment lets you [measure all twelve for yourself](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), these three included, so the box about next year is based on something firmer than a hunch. ## What carries beyond this form Some of this may already be familiar from how you work — keeping a note of what you finished, flagging a problem early rather than at the deadline. Those habits are what a strong entry is made of, and the ones you have not built yet are ordinary gaps, changeable ones, not limits on the kind of worker you are. There is no version of getting better at this that requires being someone else at work; the writing gets easier because the record gets better. It also compounds. The further along you go, the more of your standing rests on work nobody watched you do, which makes being able to describe your own contribution accurately worth more over time rather than less. Sitting down to look at what belongs in each box, rather than filling them in an hour before the deadline, is already the part most people skip. The useful next question is which of these skills to build first. ## See which skills are already yours The only thing left is to find out which of these are working for you now and which are worth naming in the box about the coming year. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: you answer questions about how you actually operate, it takes about 7 minutes, and it shows you where you stand across all twelve skills and which ones would make the biggest difference to you right now. That turns the forward-looking half of your review into something specific enough for your manager to act on. **[Take the test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** Free, 7 minutes, results straight away. ## 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 review for work examples for every section of the form: accomplishments, goals, challenges, growth areas and what to ask for next, with real evidence. ### 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-review-for-work-examples/ Preferred summary: "Self review for work examples for every section of the form: accomplishments, goals, challenges, growth areas and what to ask for next, with real evidence." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.