The year is slowly coming to an end. Many companies are now thinking about the past year to find out what worked well, where there is still room for improvement and to set new goals for the coming year. A review of the year is not only useful for companies, but also for your own career. In this way you can find out what you have achieved in the past year, review your successes and failures and draw conclusions for your professional goals in the new year. Here we explain what you should think about in your personal review of the year.

The resolutions for the past year

If you had career resolutions for the past year, now is the time to dig them up again. This is the easiest way to see whether you have achieved the things you set out to do, or at least come closer to achieving your goal. Your old resolutions will also help you formulate the new ones. Perhaps your old resolutions are also relevant for the next year or you notice that you no longer want to develop in this direction.

Successes

Whether or not you had resolutions for the past year, the next thing you should remember is your achievements over the past 12 months. It is best to write them down on a piece of paper. What you classify as a success is entirely up to you – a successful project, a promotion, a raise, more flexibility, new responsibilities or skills – whatever you consider career success to be on the list. The more detailed the better, so that you can see how you got there and why you can be proud of it. This will give you an idea of ​​how you can achieve your goals in the next year and what realistic goals could look like. It is also important that your successes are related to you and not compared to others. Comparisons can be used as motivation, but should not be the main factor in your feeling of success.

If it is difficult for you to remember concrete successes, start with the question “What am I good at?” and consider why you are the right person in your position in the company. Qualities such as reliability, organizational talent or good leadership skills can also be considered a success.

Goals not achieved

After looking at your successes, uncomfortable as it may be, focus on your unachieved goals. So all things that didn’t go according to plan, where things failed or you missed goals. This exercise is not there to make you feel bad afterwards, but rather so that you can learn from your mistakes and find out whether the failures from last year are something you want to work on in the new year or maybe they are for They are no longer relevant. So try to be as objective as possible and analyze why things didn’t go as you expected. Are there things that were really important to you and that you have not achieved, you already have a good clue on what to focus on in the new year.

Closing the New Year

Your successes and failures then logically result in your annual resolutions for your career in the new year. You should have found out what is important to you and what you are good at, so that you can decide what will bring you forward in your career in the new year and what you want to focus on. In addition, you will then know which areas are not suitable for you and you can decide whether you want to develop them further or not. In this way you can advance your career in a targeted and focused manner in the New Year.

Also, when creating your new resolutions, makes sure that they are precise. A resolution like “I want to negotiate a higher salary next year” is very vague. Instead, you should specify your resolution, for example, “I want a 25% increase in salary next year”. In this way, you can find out in a targeted manner what you would have to do for this, whether you would have to accept another position or whether this is also possible in your current position, whether you would have to take on more management responsibility and which arguments you would have to prepare for a salary negotiation.