32 Work Accomplishments Examples for Reviews and Weekly Updates

A work accomplishment is a result you caused, not a duty you held. "Managed the support inbox" is a duty. "Cut first-response time on the support inbox from two days to four hours" is an accomplishment. The difference is a short formula: what you did (action), what changed (outcome), and how anyone can tell (measure).

This page is for self-evaluations, promotion cases and weekly updates, not resumes. Every number in the examples and tables on this page is an illustrative placeholder; use your own. For the review process around them, start with how to write a self-evaluation.

What counts as a work accomplishment?

An accomplishment answers "what is different because I was here?" Your reviewer already knows your duties; they need evidence of how well you did them.

The formula: action, outcome, measure

Start with a strong verb for what you personally did (shipped, cut, rebuilt, negotiated), say what changed for the team, customer or business, and add the number or evidence that shows it happened.

Weak: "Worked on the onboarding project." With the formula: "Shipped the new onboarding flow (action), so new customers set up without a call (outcome); setup calls fell from 30 to 8 a month (measure)."

Resume writers will know a cousin of this: "Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y] by doing [Z]", the formula Laszlo Bock, Google's former head of HR, published in 2014 (Bock, LinkedIn, 29 September 2014).

How to find a measure when you don't have hard numbers

Most work has a measure even without a dashboard. The US Office of Personnel Management sorts measures into quality ("accuracy, appearance, usefulness, or effectiveness"), quantity, timeliness and cost-effectiveness (OPM, retrieved 3 November 2026). Its advice on judging work that can only be observed gives a fifth, and three more make eight places to look:

1. Count it. Tickets closed, releases shipped, people trained.
2. Time it. Ahead of a deadline, a process that now takes hours instead of days.
3. Check how well. Fewer errors, less rework, fewer reopened tickets.
4. Price it. Money saved, revenue won, a project kept within budget.
5. Before and after. A recurring problem that stopped happening.
6. Adoption. Who uses what you built: four teams, every new hire.
7. Scope. The size of what you were trusted with: a budget, a region, a team.
8. Who judged it. For work that can only be observed, OPM suggests asking who would be the best judge and what they would look for. Quote that person: a customer email, a peer's thank-you, your manager's comment.

Accomplishment examples by type

Pick the type that matches your goal, then adapt the wording.

Delivery

• Shipped the new onboarding flow two weeks early by splitting it into three releases.
• Delivered the budget model for 14 departments in time for the March board meeting, with no late revisions.
• Took over the stalled partner portal in June and launched it in August; 40 partners used it in the first month.

Quality

• Cut invoice errors from about 1 in 20 to 1 in 100 by adding a second check before month-end close.
• Halved bugs reported after release over two quarters by adding automated tests to the checkout path.
• Rewrote support macros for the 10 most common ticket types; reopened tickets on those topics fell from 18% to 9%.

Efficiency

• Automated the weekly sales report, saving the team about four hours every Monday.
• Renegotiated the cloud storage contract, saving $36,000 a year with no change in service.
• Shortened new-hire setup from three days to one with a checklist and pre-built laptops.

Collaboration

• Set up a design and engineering handoff every two weeks; rework requests on finished designs fell from 12 to 4 the next quarter.
• Covered the EMEA support queue for six weeks during a colleague's leave, keeping first response under four hours.
• Wrote a shared glossary with finance and sales, which ended the monthly argument over what counts as booked revenue.

Leadership

• Mentored two junior analysts; both now send client reports without a second review.
• Led the review after the March outage and saw all five follow-up fixes through; the failure has not recurred.
• Hired and onboarded three engineers in one quarter; all three shipped production code in their first month.

Customer

• Ran monthly check-ins with an account that had flagged it might leave; it renewed for two years.
• Raised the average post-ticket satisfaction score from 4.1 to 4.6 out of 5.
• Ran 25 customer interviews and turned the findings into the three features now at the top of the roadmap.

Accomplishment examples by role

Two per role, measured the way each job usually measures its work.

Software engineer

• Migrated the payments service to the new database with no downtime.
• Cut median dashboard load time from 3.2 to 1.4 seconds by caching the five slowest queries.

Product manager

• Ran the pricing experiment that raised trial-to-paid conversion from 8% to 11%.
• Turned down four mid-quarter requests with written trade-offs, which kept the team on its Q2 release date.

Designer

• Redesigned the signup form; completion rose from 52% to 68% in the first month.
• Built the component library all four product teams now use, so new screens no longer need a full design review.

Marketing

• Published 12 comparison pages that brought in 30% of the quarter's organic signups.
• Planned a webinar series that produced 140 qualified leads at a lower cost per lead than paid search.

Sales

• Closed $480,000 in new business against a $400,000 target (120%).
• Wrote the discovery-call checklist the team now uses; the average sales cycle fell from 60 to 45 days.

Customer support

• Answered 1,900 tickets this year with a 96% satisfaction score, the highest on the team.
• Wrote 35 help articles for the most common questions; tickets on those topics fell by a quarter.

Operations and admin

• Moved every vendor contract into one tracker with renewal reminders; none renewed by surprise this year.
• Organized the offsite for 60 people within budget; 90% rated it useful in the follow-up survey.

For whole review paragraphs built around examples like these, see the self-evaluation examples.

One accomplishment, four lengths

The facts stay the same; the detail changes with the reader.

In a review, pick three to five tied to the goals you were given, with the clearest measures. The one-line versions belong in your weekly report. For a resume, drop internal project names, lead with the number and keep each line short; Bock's resume formula is one widely shared starting point.

Keep the evidence as you go

The hard part is remembering in November what you did in March. Software engineer Julia Evans describes the review-time feeling as "wait, what did I do in the last 6 months?" (Evans, jvns.ca, 28 June 2019). Her fix is a brag document, a written record of your work and its effects, and she notes that many people find it works best updated every two weeks. The brag document guide has a template.

DoneThat does the collecting for you. It reconstructs your workday from screen and app activity (screenshots are processed and immediately deleted, never stored), writes a daily summary of what you worked on, and lets you export that history as CSV or query it through the API or MCP. It records what you worked on, not what it achieved: the measure is still yours to add.

Frequently asked questions

How many accomplishments should I list in a performance review?

Three to five is a sensible default, each tied to one of your goals. Some forms set a limit: the California College of the Arts guide asks for up to three, with up to 500 characters each (CCA HR, retrieved 3 November 2026).

What if my job is mostly maintenance and nothing ships?

Measure the absence of problems and the speed of recovery: uptime, errors avoided, requests handled within the agreed time, problems that stopped recurring.

Is an accomplishments list the same as a brag document?

No. A brag document is the running log you keep all year; an accomplishments list is what you pick from it for one reader.

Write your first three today

Look through last month's calendar, sent mail and task tracker, and write three accomplishments with action, outcome and measure. Add one a week from then on. When the review form opens, you will be choosing, not remembering.

Sources

• Bock, L. (29 September 2014). My Personal Formula for a Winning Resume. LinkedIn.
• California College of the Arts, Office of Human Resources (last updated June 2020). Work Accomplishments/Areas of Strength. Self-evaluation guide; retrieved 3 November 2026.
• Evans, J. (28 June 2019). Get your work recognized: write a brag document.
• US Office of Personnel Management. Developing Performance Standards. Undated; retrieved 3 November 2026.

Written by Don, DoneThat's AI coach (LinkedIn), so this article is AI-written. The examples and tables are illustrations with placeholder numbers, not real people's results; every factual claim is cited next to it and linked in the Sources list. Published by DoneThat (Letss B.V., Amsterdam). More about DoneThat; corrections and questions go to support.