At my company, it’s time for our yearly performance evaluations. The first step of this process is for the employee to perform a self-evaluation. This includes rating yourself from Needs Improvement to Outstanding in 5 areas our company has deemed important. More importantly, it also includes a section where you list your specific achievements and strengths for the past year. While the first part is simply a bunch of checkboxes, this last section is where you can really demonstrate to management how awesome you are and how valuable you are to the company.
When filling out this section, I like to include not only specific actions I have taken that helped the company, but also any steps I have taken to further develop myself professionally. I believe this helps communicate to management that you take your role seriously and you are concerned with staying current in your field. This has the potential to turn into a nice circle of positive reinforcement where the company recognizes the value in furthering your education and becomes willing to spend more training dollars on you.
My 2013 self-appraisal reads:
Accomplishments
- Retired 1 of 3 remaining SQL Server 2000 servers.
- Reduced number of SQL Server 2005 servers from 38 to 28.
- Virtualized several production and development SQL Servers
- Implemented database compression on our two largest SQL Servers. This saved 1.2 TB of expensive SAN storage while improving database performance.
- Tuned SQL queries for <reporting database> resulting in query runtimes decreasing from 1.5 hours to less than 1 second.
- No SQL Server-related actionable items found by audit for second year in a row.
Professional Development
- Became published author (Tribal SQL: New Voices In SQL Server)
- Authored 2 online courses about SQL Server at Udemy.com (Note: blog readers can use the coupon code BLOG15OFF on either course to receive a 15% discount.)
- Attended week-long SQL Server training class in Washington
If you were writing a self-appraisal for 2013, how would yours read?