By J. Mason
Online Career Tips Editor
Getting ready for your upcoming annual review? Before you start digging through emails for compliments and all the projects you’ve worked on, hold off and pull up your original job description. If you don’t have it you should be able to reference your LinkedIn profile for roles and responsibilities from your original position. With your highlighter at the ready emphasize all the tasks you still manage, and make notes if those specific responsibilities have increased.
There’s a reason why history is so important in schools…you need to know where you’ve been in order to understand how you got to where you are now. If your manager loves a visual presentation, create a bar graph with tasks from when you started at that organization, and then emphasize every task or project that’s been added since then in a different color and categorize them by year. These types of things get easily lost in the shuffle of emails. So, having a graphical representation can have a very big impact in your review.
It is always a good idea to provide feedback in the comment boxes of your review. Most companies use an automated system for the self-evaluation component, and those comment areas should not be ignored. Be constructive with your feedback, but also don’t neglect to emphasize your value adds, your goals for the next year, and where you want to be now, and in the near future.
That updated job description could be the key to possibly putting you over the edge in the decision making process for your manager. It’s the benchmark that will be used to evaluate your performance over the course of the year. So make sure you’re on point to answer the standard annual review questions like:
- Are you proactive?
- Do you use innovation to solve issues?
- Are you a leader
- Do you complete assigned tasks accurately and timely?
Also, as a standard practice, make sure to update these new tasks on your LinkedIn profile as they happen. It’s a good way to get new endorsements on your profile, and it lets colleagues know what you’re up to.
Good luck on your review!
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