By Dylan Sullivan, Managing Director, Accounting & Finance
Does Documenting Your Achievements Matter?
Year-end reviews are a key opportunity to demonstrate your value, secure promotions, or advocate for compensation increases. Yet, many professionals struggle to clearly articulate the impact they’ve had throughout the year. Keeping track of accomplishments throughout the year ensures you can present a compelling case for your contributions.
For professionals, documenting projects, special initiatives, and achievements beyond your core responsibilities is crucial. Doing so allows you to properly advocate for yourself in year-end reviews.
In this video, Dylan Sullivan, Managing Director on our Accounting & Finance team, discusses strategies to effectively advocate for yourself during year-end review conversations.
[Video of Dylan Sullivan, Managing Director on our Accounting & Finance team, providing insight on how professionals can track their achievements, special projects, and key contributions to effectively advocate for themselves in year-end performance reviews.]
Key Takeaways
Track accomplishments consistently: Keep a running list of projects, achievements, and special initiatives throughout the year.
Highlight your contributions: Showcase achievements that go beyond your everyday tasks.
Update your resume regularly: Maintain documentation to easily convey your achievements during year-end discussions.
Prepare a game plan for your review: Organize your talking points to ensure major projects and achievements don’t go unnoticed.
Position yourself for advancement: Demonstrating quantifiable impact helps you stand out and advocate for promotions or increased responsibilities.
Making Your Year-End Review Count
Many professionals underestimate the value of documentation and preparation for performance reviews. Here’s why taking a proactive approach matter:
- Avoid forgetting key contributions: Year-end discussions can span multiple months’ worth of work. Keeping a tracker ensures important achievements aren’t overlooked.
- Show initiative and leadership: Highlighting projects beyond your standard responsibilities’ signals proactivity and leadership potential.
- Support your compensation or promotion requests: Clear evidence of your impact strengthens your position when discussing raises, promotions, or bonuses.
- Cross-functional value: Documented achievements can help other teams or managers recognize your contributions, especially for collaborative projects.
Related reading from our Newsroom: How to Negotiate Compensation at Year-End
Ready to Take Control of Your Career?
Landing Point helps professionals effectively showcase their contributions, prepare for year-end conversations, and advocate for their growth. Reach out to explore strategies for highlighting your impact and positioning yourself for career advancement.
Transcript
Dylan Sullivan:
I think a really big thing that is always important is to make sure that you’re keeping track of all of the key areas that you’ve worked on throughout the year and special projects that you’ve completed, not just the things that are in your traditional job description or what you’re going to be doing on a daily basis.
Making sure your focus is on the things that are showing how you stepped beyond what you were expected to do. Those are the areas that are really going to be advocating for yourself and being able to put yourself in a position to show that you’re performing above your peers and putting yourself in a position to move forward with the team and within your firm.
I think a lot of people try to just go into these discussions and put themselves in a position where it’s like, “Oh, I’ll be able to remember it when I sit down there and go through everything.” If you put it in writing throughout the year, keep a tracker, or it can even be as simple as keeping your resume updated every year. Those types of things will allow you to remember these types of projects that you’ve worked on.
And when you’re going into this conversation, you have a game plan and a plan of attack. The hope is that your firm has those things recognized for you. But you’d be surprised how often companies can forget that you were the main point person on something if it happened in January or February.
And you can come into that conversation at year-end and that large project that you worked on goes a little bit unnoticed as part of what you were doing and where you made a really big impact for your firm.
About Dylan Sullivan
Dylan Sullivan is a Managing Director within Landing Point’s Accounting/Finance Division. He began his career with Deloitte, spending almost four years in their Audit practice. His clients there focused on the Health Care and Technology industries. Dylan has a BS in Accounting from Villanova University where he served as a Peer Advisor to younger students. He is an avid sports fan with a focus on Villanova Basketball and the New York Yankees.