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Still Struggling with Writing Your NSPS Self Assessment?

By Nancy Segal

Thursday, September 11, 2008

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If you are like most Department of Defense employees who converted to NSPS, you are starting to think about writing your self assessment. While not required, your self assessment is an important tool in telling your story and helping your supervisor and the Pay Pool understand what you did and how it contributed to the overall success of your agency's mission.

Why Do a Self Assessment?

While there are many who say it is their supervisor's responsibility to track their performance, NSPS allows employees to play an important role in their performance rating by writing and submitting a self assessment. No one is more invested in your performance rating and pay that you are, so take the opportunity to prepare a strong, well thought out self assessment and know that you have done everything you can to help your supervisor recognize your performance.

A Short Lesson on How to Prepare a Self Assessment

Give yourself adequate time to prepare your self assessment; this should not be a ten minute exercise! Gather your materials, including your job objectives, agency mission, list of accomplishments and the performance indicators and contributing factor benchmark descriptors for your pay schedule and pay band.

Think about your Job Objectives as KSAs. Identify your most significant accomplishments for each job objective; prepare a short narrative which details your accomplishments in an interesting and effective way. Be sure to tie your accomplishment to your agency's mission. And, do not forget to incorporate the language of the performance indicators and contributing factor benchmarks to describe your achievements. And use our free, NSPS key word tree to help you identify words that will help you be seen as a Valued Performer or better!

Draft your Self Assessment in a word processing program so you can use the character count and spell check. You may want to share your draft with your supervisor. If your supervisor has feedback, consider it. Remember, your supervisor may want to build on your Self Assessment for his or her rating.

The easier you make it for your supervisor, the easier it is for your supervisor to rate you as a Valued Performer or better. Once your Self Assessment reads the way you want, you can copy and paste it into the PAA. And, don't forget the easy stuff; make sure that you submit your Self Assessment on time.

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MORE INFORMATION: Samples, keywords, personal empowerment writing style, and instruction for writing accomplishments are available in Writing Your NSPS Self-Assessment by Kathryn Troutman and Nancy Segal. 

© 2010 The Resume Place, Inc. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced without express written consent from The Resume Place, Inc.

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