At one point or the other, you must have caught yourself evaluating your actions and examining your behavior or performance. This is self-assessment and it plays a crucial role in boosting your confidence, improving your sense of judgment, and how you interact with others. 

Many times, we depend on other people to evaluate our actions; whether in the workplace or our everyday lives. While this is extremely beneficial, you should also consciously examine your behavior, actions, and performance as a form of self-assessment. 

At the end of this article, you will understand the importance of self-assessment and how to carry out self-assessment in the right way to help you achieve the best results. Self-assessment is also essential to your personal development as a professional in the workplace. 

What is Self-Assessment? 

Self-assessment is the process of reviewing your actions, behavior, performance, and opinions in different contexts to identify aspects that need to be improved. It is some sort of introspection that allows you to reflect on your current actions and identify how to improve them. 

Self-assessment helps you to identify your strengths and weaknesses and how you can constantly improve your actions to help you achieve your goals and objectives. In many organizations, it is an important part of 360-degree feedback or multi-rater evaluation for employees. 

During self-assessment, you should focus on your skills, personal relationship, career goals, challenges, opportunities, perceptions, and decisions over a specific period. Doing this helps to create a detailed picture of how far you have come and what changes you need to make going forward.

Types of Self-Assessment 

Personal Self Assessment 

Personal self-assessment is a type of evaluation that is restricted to your personal goals, habits, relationships, and behaviors. For example, you can conduct a personal self-assessment at the end of the year to know how far you’ve come with your resolutions and what you need to do differently in the future. 

Personal self-assessment helps you to know more about yourself and to identify the values that really matter to you. It also allows you to develop a more confident personality and to align your skills and habits with your goals.   

Several online tests can help you evaluate your habits, identify your personality type and highlight your strengths and weaknesses. You can also hire a personality coach to interpret the results and map out the next steps you need to take to improve your habits. 

Employee Self Assessment

This is a formal type of self-assessment where an employee evaluates his or her performance in the workplace. It is an important part of 360-degree feedback that allows the employee to self-respect and identify highs and lows that have marked their employee journey in an organization. 

Employee self-assessment plays a crucial role in improving workplace relations and it also promotes seamless communication. For instance, you will get to know an employee’s motivation, the major challenges they have faced, and what they consider to be their wins and losses. 

As the employees assess their performance and actions, they gain useful insights that help them improve their work ethics and productivity. More importantly, they can see how their work fits into the organization’s big picture and feel like an important part of the team. 

Here are a few tips for employee self-assessment:

• Feel free to admit and highlight your accomplishments. Be sure to emphasize how these accomplishments helped the company achieve its goals; that is, their impact on the overall value chain of the business. 
• Critically assess your performance and limit any form of sentiments and subjectivity. Recognize your flaws and weaknesses and point out areas where you came up short. 
• Emphasize your commitment to growth, learning, and development. 
• Provide real-time data to back your achievements. 

Training Self-Evaluation 

Training self-evaluation is a type of assessment that helps to facilitate seamless learning; whether in school or in the workplace. Here, the employee or student reflects on the training session or coursework to gauge their levels of comprehension and to also identify any challenges they may have faced with the training. 

Training self-evaluation is an important part of the learning process because it encourages the students to reflect on how their own work meets the goals set for the coursework. It spurs the student to own the learning process and it helps the instructors to get a sense of whether the student has an accurate understanding of the crux of the training. 



Self Assessment Question Examples

Personal Self-assessment

1. What 3 things did you achieve this month? 

2. What 3 things did you struggle with the most this year? 

3. To what extent did your interaction with others improve? 

• To a large extent
• Not at all
• Prefer not to say.

4. What could you have done better this year? 

5. What/who was your strongest support system(s)? 

6. How would you rate your interpersonal skills? 

7. How would you rate your time-management skills? 

8. Did you set and maintain high standards of interaction for yourself?

9. Did you utilize available resources appropriately? 

10. On a scale of 1–10, rate your overall personal development.

B. Employee Self-assessment

1. How would you rate your overall workplace performance? 

• Excellent
• Average
• Poor 

2. Please explain the reason for your rating in question 1.

3. What key goals and objectives did you set out to achieve in this organization? 

4. What is your proudest employee moment in this organization? 

5. What major challenges have you faced while executing your job? 

6. Which 3 areas would you like to improve on, professionally? 

7. In which projects and areas do you think your skills would add the most value?

8. How would you rate your experience as an employee in our organization? 

9. What do you like the most in your current organization? 

10. What are your most significant accomplishments and contributions in this role?

Read: Motivation Assessment: Definitions, Types, Tools + [Questionnaire Examples]

Self-assessment Questions

1. On a scale of 1–10, how well did you enjoy the training? 

2. Did you find the coursework challenging?

• Yes
• No
• Prefer not to say.

3. How would you rate the instructor’s teaching method? 

4. How prepared was the instructor for the class? 

• Very prepared
• Somewhat prepared
• Not prepared at all

5. Was the coursework easy to understand?

6. Did the trainer provide additional guidance to help you understand the course materials? 

7. Did the instructor provide constructive feedback during the training?

8. Highlight 3 key takeaways from the training? 

9. Suggest 3 ways to improve this training.

10. How likely are you to recommend this course to a friend?

• Very likely
• Somewhat likely
• Very unlikely

Self Assessment Form Templates 

• Employee Evaluation Form: This form template works best for employee performance appraisal and it allows the employee in question to assess his or her contributions in the workplace over a fixed period of time. You can modify this template in the form builder to better suit your organization’s needs. 

• Course Evaluation Form: After completing some training or coursework, you can ask participants to complete this course evaluation form to help you determine how well they understood the course material. It is a great way for students to test their level of knowledge and identify any challenges they faced with the course.

• Self Evaluation Form: The Formplus self-evaluation form makes it easy for you to assess your performance, skills, and behaviors; whether as an employee in the workplace or as an individual. It includes multiple form fields and questions that help you discover your strengths and weaknesses. The feedback from this process can improve the individual or employee.

How to Create a Self Assessment Form 

Formplus is a data collection tool that allows you to create different types of forms and surveys from scratch. Here is how you can create a self-assessment form using Formplus. 

• First, visit www.formpl.us to sign in to your Formplus account. If you do not have a Formplus account, you can easily create one by choosing the “sign up here” option at the bottom of the page. 

• On your Formplus dashboard, click on the “create new form” button to access the form builder. 
• In the Formplus builder, you can seamlessly create your self-assessment form using the numerous options available. On the left side of the builder, you will find the form fields section with more than 30 options that you can add to your self-evaluation form. 

• Drag and drop preferred form fields into your self-assessment form from the builder’s fields section. After adding the fields, you can modify them by clicking on the edit icon beside each field. 

• Save the changes you’ve made by clicking on the “Save” icon on the top-right corner of the builder. 
• Next, beautify your self-assessment form using the builder’s customization options. You can change the layout of your form, add your organization’s logo, change the form font or personalize its outlook using custom CSS. 

• Copy the form link and share it with respondents. 

Conclusion 

When conducting a self-assessment, you should maintain an objective balance between your accomplishments and weaknesses. You should clearly communicate your value while expressing your willingness to grow and learn; whether in employee self-assessment or personal self-assessment. 

Self-assessment should not be done in a hurry; take some time to reflect on how far you have come and highlight the different experiences that marked your journey. More importantly, stay positive when describing your challenges and show how you intend to overcome them.