Rethinking the Annual Review Self Evaluation

Every year I have to do an annual review - where I meet with my manager and discuss my performance over the course of the past year. Usually these reviews require me to respond to some sort of questionnaire about my work - with questions kinda like these:

List the projects that you worked on?

Which project are you the most proud of?

How can you improve?

  

For my last review, I felt inspired to switch up my submission to my manager and handed her this instead of the traditional q and a response form:

My manager, Erin Knight, responded to it well and was able to ask me relevant questions based on the things that I chose to highlight. This year I was going to take it up a notch and make this an interactive experience. As I started to think about how to go about this work.

The first thing that I did was create a list in Evernote of all of my work:

Then I started to think about if this was going to be interactive - where would I link out to my work. This helped me to realize that I have my work documented in several places online, including: this blog, flickr and github. This lead me to an a-ha moment. I had skills that I wanted to show off, evidence to back up that I did in fact earn or enhance those skills and... I had a peer reviewer to potentially endorse me. Are you following me here? BADGES!

What I imagining here is a re-envisioning of the self evaluation. Instead of thinking about this as an evaluation - you can imagine this being a tool to help to uncover what you have learned over the course of the year and how you could potentially further your learning moving forwards. I am proposing a tool where I can self issue badges, with evidence and have those badges endorsed by my peer. A more complex version of this would integrate career pathways and mentorship opportunities - as well as a recommendation system.

Here is my first sketch on this idea:

Thinking to be continued.....