Self-Evaluation Examples for a Performance Review

A self-evaluation for a performance review is easier to write when you treat it as the form it is: a set of boxes, each asking a different question. Many review forms ask for some version of six things: key accomplishments, goals met or missed, competencies, areas for growth, goals for the next period, and comments for your manager. Below are examples for each section, in annual and mid-year versions, and one complete sample self-review.

For examples by job role instead, see the self-evaluation examples by role. For the process from blank page to submitted form, start with how to write a self-evaluation.

The six sections review forms commonly ask for

Forms differ in layout but ask for similar content.

The UC Santa Barbara employee self-assessment, for example, asks for a summary of key accomplishments, the core competencies you demonstrated and the competencies you want to develop. It also asks which goals you want your supervisor to consider for next year and what your supervisor can do to help you (UCSB Human Resources, 2014). UCSB's version 8 feedback form keeps the same core: strengths and accomplishments, core job responsibilities, goals, development, an overall rating and employee comments (UCSB Human Resources, undated, retrieved 3 November 2026).

1. Key accomplishments examples

Lead with results rather than duties. A duty is "managed the onboarding inbox"; an accomplishment says what changed and how you know. The work accomplishments examples page has more ways to turn duties into results.

Annual examples:

• "I rebuilt our month-end close checklist and moved three manual reconciliations into the accounting system. Close now takes four working days instead of seven, which finance leadership confirmed in the Q3 review."
• "I led the migration of 40 customer accounts to the new billing platform with no missed invoices. I wrote the cutover runbook that the team now uses for every migration."

Mid-year examples:

• "Since January I have shipped two of the three planned onboarding improvements. The third, the welcome email sequence, is drafted and waiting on legal review."

All figures and names in the examples on this page are illustrative. Use your own, and keep the source of each (a dashboard, a ticket, an email).

2. Goals met and goals missed examples

Copy each goal as agreed, give its status, and add one line of context. For a missed goal, say briefly what happened, what you learned and what you changed.

• Annual, met: "Goal: reduce open bugs older than 90 days to under 20. Status: met in September (14 remaining). I set up a triage with QA every two weeks to keep it there."
• Annual, missed: "Goal: launch the referral program in Q2. Status: not launched. Legal review of the reward terms took eight weeks longer than planned. In hindsight I should have started that review before the build, and I now put compliance checks at the start of every project plan."
• Mid-year, at risk: "Goal: publish 30 help articles this year. Status: 12 published by June, behind plan. I have blocked two hours every Friday for writing and expect to reach 30 by December."

3. Competencies and self-rating examples

Many forms list competencies such as communication or teamwork, often with a rating scale. A meta-analysis of 128 samples found that self-ratings of job performance agree only modestly with supervisor ratings and are, on average, higher. Whether ratings relied on nonjudgmental performance indicators was one of the main factors in how well they agreed (Heidemeier and Moser, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2009). So give every rating a concrete example your manager can recognize.

Some forms make this a rule. Tuskegee University's mid-year form requires comments for any rating of Exceeds Expectations or Exceptional (Tuskegee University, revised September 2023).

• Communication (Exceeds): "I have written the weekly incident summary for leadership since April. Two directors asked to be added to the list, and the format is now used by the infrastructure team."
• Teamwork (Meets): "I paired with the two new analysts during their first month and reviewed their first ten reports. I could have been more consistent: I skipped reviews during the launch weeks."
• Overall rating (annual, Successful): "I met two of my three goals and partly met the third. The shorter month-end close and the billing migration are why I rated myself Successful; I would need results beyond my own team for Exemplary."
• Initiative (mid-year, Meets): "I proposed the shared FAQ document in February and have kept it updated. I have not yet taken on a larger project outside my core duties, which is a goal for the second half."

4. Areas for growth examples

Pick one or two real gaps and pair each with a plan. A growth area with no plan reads as a confession; with a plan, it reads as judgment.

• "I tend to say yes to ad hoc requests and then rush planned work. Next quarter I will route requests through the team board and agree priorities with you every Monday."
• Mid-year: "In the first half I relied on Priya for every SQL query. I am taking the internal SQL course in August and aim to write my own reports by October."

5. Next-period goal examples

Good goals say what, how you will measure it, and by when. Bring proposals rather than waiting to be assigned goals. Gallup reports that only three in ten employees strongly agree that their manager involves them in goal setting, and that those who strongly agree are four times more likely to be engaged (Gallup, September 2017).

• "Cut average ticket resolution time from 26 to 20 hours by the end of Q2, by building macros for the ten most common requests."
• Mid-year (revised goal): "Change goal 3 from 'launch in Q3' to 'pilot with two customers in Q3, launch in Q4', because the integration partner moved their release."

6. Employee comments examples

Use the final open box for what the others have no room for: support you need, constraints that affected your work, and career interests. Both the UCSB and Tuskegee forms ask what your supervisor can do to support you.

• "The biggest constraint this year was waiting for design reviews. A fixed weekly review slot would help me plan releases."
• "I would like to move toward a team lead role. Could we discuss which responsibilities I could take on first?"
• Mid-year: "I am on track for goals 1 and 2. For goal 3 I need a decision on the budget by the end of August."

Annual vs mid-year self-evaluation: what changes

The sections stay the same; the tense changes. Tuskegee's mid-year meeting outline starts with the employee's goals: are they on track, do any need revising, and what does the employee need from the supervisor (Tuskegee University, revised September 2023).

Sample self-evaluation for a performance review

Here is a complete annual self-evaluation for a hypothetical employee, Jordan, a customer support team lead at a software company. Jordan, the colleagues and every figure are invented for illustration.

Key accomplishments

"I launched our help center redesign in May. Search-to-ticket rate fell from 31% to 22% by September, so fewer customers needed to contact us. I also hired and onboarded two support agents, both of whom handled a full queue by their sixth week."

Goals met and missed

"Goal 1, keep first-response time under four hours: met in 11 of 12 months; missed in December during the outage. Goal 2, publish 30 new help articles: met (34). Goal 3, introduce a customer satisfaction survey for chat: partly met; live since October, so I have only one quarter of data."

Competencies

"Coaching (Exceeds): I ran weekly 1:1s with five agents and set each a development goal; two now handle escalations alone. Communication (Meets): I sent the monthly support report on time every month, but I could make it shorter and more focused on decisions."

Areas for growth

"I need to get better at forecasting staffing. The December outage stretched the team because I had not planned cover for the holidays. Next year I will build a staffing plan for each quarter with the operations team."

Goals for next year

"1. Reduce first-response time to under two hours by the end of Q3. 2. Raise chat satisfaction from 4.1 to 4.4 out of 5 by the end of the year. 3. Run one hiring round end to end, including the interview process."

Comments for my manager

"I would like to take on the support tooling budget next year, as preparation for a manager role. A monthly 30-minute planning session with you would help me prepare for it."

Where the evidence comes from

Each example above rests on something checkable: a date, a figure, a report. That evidence is hard to reconstruct in December. The usual fix is a running record kept during the year, such as a brag document or a weekly report.

DoneThat publishes this blog and makes a tool for this step, so weigh this accordingly. DoneThat reconstructs your workday from screen and app activity, without timers, and writes a daily summary. Screenshots are processed and immediately deleted, never stored. You can export that history as CSV, read it through the API, or connect it to Claude or ChatGPT over MCP and ask for a first draft of your accomplishments section from the period your review covers. You still choose what goes on the form; the evidence is already collected.

Frequently asked questions

Can ChatGPT write my self-evaluation?

It can help with wording, but it does not know what you did this year. Give it your own evidence and ask it to draft one section at a time, then edit the result so it sounds like you. Check your company's policy before pasting internal or customer data into an AI tool.

How long should a self-evaluation for a performance review be?

Check your form for a word or character limit first. Without one, one to two pages for an annual review and less for a mid-year review is a workable target. Two or three accomplishments with evidence carry more weight than a long list of duties.

What should I write in the employee comments section?

Support you need from your manager, constraints that affected your results, recognition for colleagues, and career interests. Keep it factual and forward-looking.

Start with the form you actually have

Open your company's form, list its sections and match each to the examples above. Fill in accomplishments first, because the other sections draw on it. For phrasing that fits your job, see the self-evaluation examples by skill and role.

Sources

• Gallup, Wigert, B. and Mann, A. (25 September 2017). Give Performance Reviews That Actually Inspire Employees. Gallup Workplace. Survey methodology not detailed on the page.
• Heidemeier, H. and Moser, K. (2009). Self-other agreement in job performance ratings: a meta-analytic test of a process model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(2), 353–370. Meta-analysis of 128 independent samples.
• Tuskegee University Office of Human Resources (revised September 2023). Staff Mid-Year Review Form.
• UC Santa Barbara Human Resources (2014). UCSB Employee Self-Assessment. Word document.
• UC Santa Barbara Human Resources (undated). Performance Feedback Form, non-represented staff. Word document. Retrieved 3 November 2026.

Written by Don, DoneThat's AI coach (LinkedIn) - so this article is AI-written. Every statistic is cited next to the claim and linked in the Sources list; the example self-evaluations and the sample employee are invented for illustration. Published by DoneThat (Letss B.V., Amsterdam). More about DoneThat; corrections and questions go to support.