Self-assessment is critical to everyone’s personal career development. Here is a question for you – How well do you know yourself?
You may be aware of your interests but probably couldn’t explain why your work-related values are essential to you.
While you may know your strengths, you may not have a comprehensive list of all your skills.
Even if you could list all of your personality traits, there’s a high probability that you don’t know how to use this knowledge to find a career that fits you.
In this article, you will learn what self-assessment is and how it improves your personal career development.
We will also be sharing with you seven tips for making self-evaluations meaningful and how to assess yourself. There will be a bonus section sharing the different types of assessments as well.
What is Self-Assessment?
Self-assessment is not a test, and there are no right or wrong answers.
You get to make ability assessments objectively by collecting various data that include your work-related values, interests, behavioral preferences, and aptitudes.
Based on the results, you can then identify careers that are a good fit for you. Of course, there will be other variables that you need to consider before making a career choice.
But this will only happen during your career exploration stage.
A self-evaluation assessment allows you to reflect and monitor your achievements, career progression and skills development throughout your time at the organization.
Balanced self-assessment also enables you to reflect on the ability in question and habits you have developed and what areas need improvement.
You may utilize your self-assessment to keep track of your accomplishments that you’d like to highlight to your employer.
You can also use your self-evaluation as evidence to request a promotion and salary increment in the workplace.
How Self-Assessment Improves Personal Career Development?
Self-assessment is a highly effective method used to track your professional career development.
It also allows you to learn about yourself at a deeper level to identify your actual ability and areas of development.
With the level of understanding you have about yourself, you can then explore careers that allow you to maximize your strengths and align with your values.
List of 15 Benefits of Self-Assessment
- Allows you to feel confident in your skills and helps to decrease work-related anxiety and uncertainty.
- Allows you to make quick changes to adapt and develop your capabilities.
- Assists you in identifying which training programs are most suitable for you to help close your development gaps.
- Assists you in selecting an ideal coach or training for your specific professional goals.
- Enables you to craft your resumes and cover letters tailored to your strengths and showcase your skills.
- Allows you to reflect and appraise your prior achievements and failures truthfully.
- Provides you with a foundation to set and plan your future goals.
- Serves as a motivating factor for you to keep striving for success in your career and personal life.
- Serves as a basis for career advancement, salary increment, or employee contract extension.
- Identifies any disparities between you and your manager’s view of your work’s actual performance.
- Assists you in identifying your strengths and limitations objectively.
- Helps you to be receptive to feedback and use this as an opportunity to learn and develop yourself further.
- Capable of making sound judgments based on your self-evaluations, values and strengths.
- Comfortable expressing your needs or perspectives and not always going with the flow during discussions.
- Assists you in learning and developing strong emotional intelligence for your well-being and creating fulfilling relationships with others.
7 Tips for Making Self-Evaluations Meaningful
While it may seem like just another additional job, self-evaluation can greatly improve your work and life.
While it may seem hard and sometimes awkward to write about your accomplishments, there are some steps you can follow to make a clear and successful self-evaluation.
Talk about your career map
Your self-assessment should not be limited to where you are right now in life and your career.
Doing self-evaluation is an opportunity for you to identify the gap between where you are now and where you want to be in the future.
Once you identify the gaps of where you are now, use this chance to set short and long-term career goals to plan your career roadmap.
Having this roadmap allows you to develop the necessary skills and knowledge to become who you want to be in the future.
Keep an open dialogue
Mapping your successes to your organization’s goals is critical for a more effective self-evaluation.
Use this self-evaluation process as a chance to build your status and personal brand. You can also distinguish yourself from the rest of the team with your strengths and capabilities.
Generally, a self-evaluation is conducted during your performance review. Although, you can always initiate these conversations with your direct manager/supervisor.
Discuss your career path and additional feedback with your direct manager, especially during the effective performance review processes.
Ask how self-evaluations are used
Reach out to your boss and inquire about the utilization of self-evaluations in your organization. Is self-evaluation linked to any bonus, promotion, or reward?
Being aware of these will help you decide what you need to do and how much effort to put in when completing the self-assessment.
Ask yourself the hard questions
An effective self-evaluation requires you to be brutally honest and objective about yourself.
A self-assessment gives you the opportunity to ask yourself questions and objectively evaluate your strengths and weaknesses.
You can begin by responding to the following questions as honestly and truthful as you can:
- What might I have done better this year?
- What are my strengths and weaknesses?
- How can I develop or improve my weaknesses?
Be optimistic
One crucial point you need to keep in mind is never to use your self-evaluation to criticize your boss or the organization.
In your self-evaluation form, you should focus 90% of it on giving positive and non-threatening feedback, especially feedback after success.
The other 10% should be used to highlight your areas of development.
Remember, do not criticize anyone including your supervisors, colleagues, or career development experts in your self-evaluation.
Instead, use this opportunity to concentrate on yourself, your successes and your career development.
Document your achievements
Be very precise and highlight your achievements. When stating your accomplishments, make sure you emphasize how you did and who was affected by it, and the impact it brought to the organization.
Instead of describing your success vaguely, be specific about your excellent performance.
Make sure you describe the full story of what you did, including the problems, solutions and outcomes you achieved.
You can also take advantage of relevant figures and facts to support your achievements further.
Ask for guidance, direction and mentoring
Numerous studies show that employee happiness, engagement, and motivation are critical business indicators.
But, some organizations still never practice performance reviews or 1 to 1 meetings to check in with their employees. If this is the case, you may want to reconsider if you are in the right company.
You should try to approach your boss and start a conversation about self-evaluation and performance review. Make sure you discuss with your boss to set a schedule for frequent performance reviews and appraisals.
How to Write a Self-Assessment About Yourself
In general, self-assessments involve assessing your strengths, weaknesses, accomplishments as well as failures.
From an organizational and HR perspective, self-evaluation involves evaluating yourself from an employee standpoint.
You evaluate your job performance based on the tasks and projects you completed, whether you adhere to rules and regulations, social skills, communication skills, and additional skills.
Your self-evaluation should be divided into three parts. The first part is acknowledging your achievements which is followed by admitting your failures.
Lastly, planning and preparing for the future. These components are closely linked to the main objectives of a self-evaluation.
1. Acknowledging your achievements
Begin your self-appraisal by identifying your successes, and what you have achieved. Here are some areas where you can think about the successes you achieved:
- Projects that you executed within the given deadline and played a significant role.
- Projects in which you gave more than was expected of you.
- All the additional tasks you completed for your boss, co-workers, etc.
- Courses, training, or other learning opportunities for your career development
- Goals and objectives you accomplished.
Remember to be as specific as possible when providing information about your achievements. Bear in mind also the value your contribution provided to the organization as a whole.
2. Admitting your failures
No one likes to admit that they made mistakes or have failed. Yet, in the business world, recognizing your mistakes and reflecting on them is a significant advantage to have.
Failure feedback is a great opportunity for self-development and improvement. Remember always to include how you intend to prevent the mistakes you made in the future after acknowledging them.
Whenever feasible, try to justify the reasons behind your failures. However, do not look for external factors, excuses or blame others.
As a self-assessment is about yourself, you should focus on your shortcomings that may have contributed to the failures.
3. Preparing for the future
Setting achievable goals and aspirations for the future is a critical component of self-evaluations, if not the most significant. You should be focusing on what lies ahead of you and leaving the past behind you.
If you are determined to have a successful career, you must start planning your next action step.
Your objectives are determined by whether you desire to grow in your current career or move to a different role, department or industry.
By completing a self-assessment, you may discover which activities are more appealing to you.
You can also find out what tasks/projects you want to do more in the next year and which ones you would gladly avoid if given a chance.
Self-Assessment Tools and Test
Value Inventories
When choosing a career, your values may be the most crucial factor to consider.
If you don’t consider your values when planning your career, there’s a significant possibility that the job will be incompatible, and you may not enjoy it.
Values can be classified into two types: intrinsic values and extrinsic values.
Intrinsic values are associated with the work itself and its contribution to society. External elements such as physical environment or compensation and benefit are extrinsic values.
Interest Inventories
Interest inventories are widely administered by career development specialists. Individuals will answer a series of questions about their interests in these assessments.
Dr. John Holland and colleagues devised a framework for categorizing interests into six categories: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional.
The interests are then matched with the different types of vocations. When you complete the interest assessment, your results are compared to this research to discover which occupation you are more compatible with.
Personality Inventories
Many personality assessments are based on Psychiatrist Carl Jung’s personality theory. He theorized that an individual’s personality is made up of four pairs of opposing preferences.
They are extroversion and introversion (how one energizes), sensing and intuition (how one sees information), thinking or feeling (how one makes decisions), and judging and perceiving (how one lives their life).
An individual’s personality type comprises one preference from each of the four pairs of preferences.
Career counselors frequently utilize the results of Jungian Personality Theory-based assessments, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), to help an individual identify which career suits their personality the most.
An extrovert, for example, might struggle in a job that requires them to spend most of their time alone doing work.
Aptitude Assessments
You must first understand your aptitudes before deciding on a career path. An inherent or learned talent is referred to as an aptitude. Think about what you enjoy, in addition to what you are excellent at doing.
It is possible that you could be incredibly good at doing something but loathe every second spent doing it. However, in general, individuals prefer doing what they are excellent at, and here is where the HIGH5 test shines! Take a free strengths test to discover your strengths and talents.
While assessing your talents, consider how much time you are willing to invest in learning more advanced or new skills.
A thing to consider is whether you would be willing and able to make the time commitment to prepare for a career with all of the attributes you are looking for in a job.
Self Assessment in Education
Recently, many fresh and young graduates are struggling to find a job nowadays. These students are required to make critical decisions at an early age on their career direction.
That’s when some students realized that they had no interest in the majors that they spent 3 to 5 years studying.
Or, upon graduation, they found out that there was a severe lack of job opportunities in their desired industry.
There could also be a significant ‘skill mismatch’ between the graduates and the job opportunities available in the market.
These struggles faced by young individuals may be significantly reduced if they had the opportunity to explore their values, interests, strengths and areas of development that can be tied to their career aspirations.
Unfortunately, most educational institutions do not encourage their students to undertake a self-assessment nor do they offer any feedback for students.
Self Assessment Vs. High5 Test
HIGH5 is a part of the 100happydays foundation, which aims to help individuals live happy and meaningful lives. It was founded by the foundation’s Chief Happiness Officer, Dmitry Golubnichy.
The strength test is developed as a consequence of researching and improving the happiness of over 8 million individuals in 160 different countries.
HIGH5 Test is a strength-based test that is free for everyone to use. HIGH5 believes that the world would be a better place if everyone were aware and taking full advantage of their strengths.
You, your family, co-workers, organizations, and community, will notice a change after taking this test.
Take advantage of this free strengths test from HIGH5 to figure out your purpose as well as what drives and energizes you in your personal and professional life.
This strength test will give you a headstart in your self-discovery and self-evaluation process.
Self-Assessment FAQ
How Do I Do a Self-Assessment?
Your self-evaluation should be divided into three parts. The first part is acknowledging your achievements which should be followed with admitting your failures.
Then, you should start planning and preparing for the future. You should identify your successes and be as specific as possible when providing information about your achievements.
Next, you need to recognize your mistakes and reflect on them. Framing your failures as opportunities for self-development and improvement.
Lastly, plan and set short-, medium- and long-term goals to help you achieve your career aspirations.
What are Self-Assessment Skills?
Knowing what skills you have and excel at might help you identify careers that complement your strengths.
These skills could be technical skills unique to your industry or transferable skills used in any occupation or industry.
Transferable skills include soft skills such as teamwork, decision-making, communication skills, etc.
How Do I Do a Self-Assessment For a Job?
In your self-assessment, you should think about what you are doing currently and what you see yourself doing in your career as a whole.
Schedule a 1 to 1 meeting with your manager to discuss your career path and performance in relation to the business.
Ask yourself hard questions and conduct an objective evaluation of your strengths and weaknesses.
Be very precise and highlight your achievements. Seek guidance, direction and mentoring from your individuals who are already in the position you aspire to be.
What Is the Purpose of a Self-Assessment?
Self-assessment helps you to evaluate yourself objectively by collecting various data that includes your work-related values, interests, behavioral preferences, and aptitudes.
Based on the results, you can then identify careers that are a good fit for you.
