# Year End Self Assessment Examples: 8 Entries and How to Adapt Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/year-end-self-assessment-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/year-end-self-assessment-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 Eight year end self assessment examples covering results, teamwork, weaknesses and next-year goals - plus how to adapt each one so it sounds like you. ## Key facts - Title: Year End Self Assessment Examples: 8 Entries and How to Adapt Them - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Communication - Primary keyword: year end self assessment examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/year-end-self-assessment-examples/ ## What this page covers - Eight year end self assessment examples covering results, teamwork, weaknesses and next-year goals - plus how to adapt each one so it sounds like you. - Practical guidance for year end self assessment examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation The form is open, the deadline is this week, and the box is still empty. A year end self assessment works best when each entry names one specific thing you did, the result it produced, and what you would change next time — roughly three quarters of the space on what went well, the rest on one genuine area you are working on. The year end self assessment examples below all follow that shape. What makes them usable, though, is the step almost everyone skips before writing a line. ## Before you write anything, rebuild the year Almost every guide on this topic tells you to keep a running record of your accomplishments throughout the year. That is good advice for next January and no help at all in December. The source that addresses the situation you are actually in is university HR: UC Davis recommends reconstructing the year from what you already have — old to-do lists, project folders, and your sent mail, read to trigger memory rather than reread in full. Give it half an hour. Scroll your sent mail from January forward, walk back through your calendar month by month, and write down every item as a single line without stopping to judge whether it is impressive. You are collecting raw material, not drafting. Then sort what you collected into three piles, because a complete self-assessment covers all three and most people submit only the first: results (what you delivered), behaviors (how you worked with other people), and growth (what you learned, and where you fell short). The behavior pile is the one that comes back nearly empty, and it is where any claim about teamwork, reliability, or communication has to come from. ## Eight year end self assessment examples, and what each one is doing Each example below is a pattern rather than a sentence to submit. The structure underneath them is the one the example banks keep returning to — STAR: the situation, the task you owned, the action you took, the result it produced. You rarely need all four spelled out, but when an entry feels weak, it is almost always the result that is missing. ### 1. The result you delivered > I rebuilt our client onboarding checklist, which cut average setup time from nine days to under seven and removed the two handover steps that generated most of the follow-up questions. This is the entry a manager looks for first, and the one most people write as a task list instead. The strong published examples always attach a number to a named piece of work — turnaround time down 25 percent, or infrastructure costs down $2,000 a month, in the samples PerformYard and GoPerfect publish. If your work does not produce revenue figures, the change does not have to be financial: hours saved, errors avoided, or a handover that stopped needing supervision all carry the same weight. ### 2. The goal you were actually set > My target was twelve completed audits for the year. I closed fourteen, including two that were added in the autumn when a colleague went on leave. Organize at least part of the assessment against [the objectives you were given](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/goals-for-performance-review/) rather than a generic competency list. Lattice recommends using your objectives and key results as the framework and filling in the year's detail underneath them. The reason is practical: your manager is measured on those same objectives, so an entry mapped onto one is the easiest thing in your form for them to use. ### 3. The area you are working on > In the second quarter I lost track of two deadlines when [three projects overlapped](/knowledge/time-management/time-management-and-prioritization/). I raised it in my one-on-one, started blocking a planning slot every Monday, and delivered on time from September onward. Next year I want that in place from the start of each quarter rather than after something slips. Three parts: what went wrong, what you changed, what you will do differently. Culture Amp puts the working ratio at roughly 70-80 percent strengths and 20-30 percent a real development area — enough space that the section reads as honest, not so much that it rewrites your year. The version PerformYard publishes follows exactly this shape, and it is what makes a weakness read as judgment rather than as a liability. ### 4. The time you carried the team > When our designer was out for five weeks, I took over the asset handoffs so the campaign did not slip, and wrote the short guide the team still uses for that process. Teamwork claims are where the sample phrases are at their most generic. Lines about actively listening to colleagues' ideas appear almost word for word across sources, and give a manager nothing to verify. An occasion beats a disposition: name the weeks, the person you covered for, and what would otherwise have been dropped. ### 5. The communication that changed something > I started sending a Friday summary to the three stakeholders on the project, which ended the Monday round of status emails and cut our check-in from an hour to twenty minutes. "I'm a strong communicator" turns up across these guides as the canonical example of a line that gets skimmed. The fix is to name the mechanism and its effect instead: the strong published versions describe a specific practice, such as a weekly stakeholder meeting or [a client summary report](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-write-email-to-manager-regarding-updates/), and then what it reduced. Describe what you set up, not how well you do it. ### 6. The skill you built and then used > I finished the data analysis course in the spring and rebuilt our monthly reporting on it, which took the reporting cycle from two days down to half a day. Training on its own reads as an expense. Paired with an application, it reads as a contribution — PerformYard's sample answers pair a certification completed in eight weeks with the monthly cost reduction the new skill made possible. If you completed something this year and have not used it yet, say what you intend to use it on. ### 7. The problem that was not your job > When the supplier changed their file format in October, I rewrote our import routine over two days instead of escalating it, and the weekly reports went out on schedule. This entry lives in the behavior pile, and it is the one people leave out because it resists a number. It is often the only place your initiative becomes visible: work absorbed under disruption is invisible in any goal list precisely because nobody planned it. Say what would have happened if you had not picked it up. ### 8. What you want next year > Next year I want to run the quarterly reporting cycle end to end rather than contribute to it, and to take the internal facilitation training so I can lead the review workshops myself. Close forward. PeopleGoal's annual examples all finish on a concrete development plan rather than a general aspiration, and there is a tactical reason to copy that: the form is read before [your review conversation](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/year-end-review/), so whatever you put here sets that meeting's agenda. Naming a specific responsibility is how you get to discuss it. ## How to adapt these examples so they don't read as a template Two habits do most of the work. Keep each entry short — UC Santa Barbara's HR office treats brevity as strategy rather than style, on the grounds that your manager is working through several of these in a compressed window, and a long answer is more likely to be skimmed than a short one. And lead each entry with its point, then support it, rather than building up to it. The harder half is the behavior pile. Describing what you delivered is mostly a retrieval problem; describing how you worked — where you were reliable, where you were direct, where you took something on — asks for language most people have never used about themselves. If that is the part that stalls you, it is usually vocabulary rather than modesty, and a free skills check is a quick way to get [words for how you work](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you fill in the box. ## The skills behind a self-assessment that lands Read back over those eight entries and notice how little of the difficulty is actually writing. What separates a strong entry from a weak one is that somebody kept track of what they did, understood which part mattered, and could say so plainly to the person evaluating them. **Working with Your Manager** is doing most of the work here. This is the one point in the year formally set aside for your own account of your performance, and it feeds straight into your manager's evaluation — which makes it a visibility exercise before it is a writing exercise. Results your manager never saw do not count, and the form is where you make them count. It is also why the forward-looking parts matter: the document opens a conversation in which you can ask for what you want next. **Building Self-Awareness** is what the development section runs on. Knowing what you are genuinely good at, as opposed to merely competent at, keeps the strengths half accurate instead of inflated. The feedback you were given during the year is evidence you already hold — the corrections, the thing a colleague asked you to change in March. One real blind spot, described alongside what you did about it, reads very differently from a manufactured one, and a manager reading eight of these can tell them apart. **Communication** decides whether any of it gets read. State the point first and support it afterward, be specific rather than emphatic, keep it brief, and stay positive without inflating — which is harder than it sounds when the subject is your own year. None of the three is a fixed trait. They are behaviors, which means the version of you filling in this form next December can be better at them than the version filling it in now. If you want to know which deserves your attention before the next review cycle, the free Work Skills Test shows you [where yours currently stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) across these three and the nine others the framework treats as the core of working life. ## What this document is really asking of you Some of this may already describe how you work. If you covered for someone this autumn, or set up the summary that ended a weekly round of questions, you have the material — you have simply never had to write it down as evidence about yourself. That is an ordinary place to be, and it moves. These are behaviors rather than parts of your personality, so next year's account can be a stronger document without you becoming a different person at work. The direction of travel is worth noticing: the further into a career you go, the more of your standing rests on how well you can describe your own contribution — and that describing is a learnable part of the job, not a requirement to become someone louder. You have also already done the part most people put off, by working out what to write before the deadline rather than at midnight on the day it closes. The open question is which of these skills is yours to build. ## See where your work skills stand The only thing left is to find out. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills that takes about 7 minutes: you answer a set of questions about how you actually operate at work, and you get back a picture of where you stand across all twelve of them — including the three that decide how a self-assessment reads. It will not write your form for you. It will tell you which one or two skills would make the biggest difference to next year's version of this document. [Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) Free, and it takes about 7 minutes. ## 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? Eight year end self assessment examples covering results, teamwork, weaknesses and next-year goals - plus how to adapt each one so it sounds like you. ### 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/year-end-self-assessment-examples/ Preferred summary: "Eight year end self assessment examples covering results, teamwork, weaknesses and next-year goals - plus how to adapt each one so it sounds like you." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.