Get ready for your next personal development review

Are you going to your first development review? Or is it time for the annual review, and you're not sure what to say?

Your annual personal development review (In Danish: medarbejderudviklingssamtale or MUS) is a golden opportunity for you to take stock of your career aspirations, make an active plan to stay market-ready, and to have a dialogue with your manager about your dreams and ambitions. It's also your opportunity to highlight the contributions you've made throughout the year - and lay the groundwork for your next salary negotiation.

So even if you are busy with your daily tasks and deadlines, you should prioritise your development review. Here are some useful tips on how to prepare for your next development review with your manager.

What is a personal development review?

A development interview/review is a conversation between you and your manager about your well-being and your current and future work tasks.

The purpose is to strengthen your growth, your skills and your job satisfaction as an employee, while at the same time enabling your workplace to make the best possible use of your potential.

The interview is not a legal requirement.

In some places, the interview follows a carefully designed plan, template or structure. In other places, it does not.

The questions you need to ask yourself before your personal development review

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What tasks do I have that energise me and what tasks drain me?
• Do I have a good friend at work? In other words, a good professional sparring partner who makes me feel better. Everyone needs someone to discuss things with, and if you need a sparring partner, you can bring it up during the interview.
• If I want to increase my enjoyment of work in the coming years, what is the most important thing to do?

You can begin your preparation by looking at your current tasks. The tasks that boost your performance and give you energy should fill at least 70-80% of your workday. Tasks that drain your energy should not cover more than 20-30%.

Consider the current distribution of your tasks, and what it would take to achieve the right balance to boost your performance and ensure your well-being at work.

Prepare all year

Instead of starting to prepare on the day before the interview, you should prepare for your next personal development review 365 days a year.

This doesn't mean that you have to spend hours each week preparing. Setting aside 5-10 minutes each week keeping a log or in some other way regularly keeping track of your results at work will ensure that you have constant focus on your development - and give you plenty of things to discuss in your review.

How to talk to your manager about your tasks

When mapping your own tasks, you'll get an idea of what to share with your manager. It could be things like:

• This is what I want to do more of
• This is what I want to do less of because it does not motivate me
• This is what I want to get off my desk completely
• This is what I miss and would like to work more on

Remember to support your points with concrete examples of why this would also be good for the company.

Make your work and results visible

A review is your chance to highlight what you can do and what you contribute to the company.

Prioritise a few messages you want to get across that your manager needs to know before you leave.

You could also consider planting a little seed ahead of the salary negotiation you are due to have at some point. Here, you could perhaps say, in an informal way, that ‘your manager can keep in mind the results you have achieved when you have a salary discussion at some point.’

This way, you lay the groundwork for a good outcome in the salary negotiation.

How to negotiate your salary in the annual salary negotiation

Be honest with your manager

MUS is also a forum where you can discuss difficult issues.

You should remember that a manager is – or should be – someone you can be honest with. If you are not honest, how can your manager know about your challenges and be able to lead and help you?

If there is something that upsets you, something work-related that keeps you awake at night or a colleague you have difficulty with, you should bring it up at the MUS. But always keep it professional, sober and constructive, and ask for advice on how to resolve the conflict.

Argue professionally rather than emotionally

Always put your points in a professional context. Emotional arguments will not work on your manager, at least not if they stem from something negative.

For example, if you have a colleague who gets all the fun assignments, say: ‘I would like us to cover for each other more, so that it is not so vulnerable if one of us is away. If we spar more and can take on each other's tasks, we will become more robust as a team’.

This is a professional way of saying that you are actually extremely tired of your colleague getting all the fun tasks. But remember: keep the negative feelings out, but feel free to use the positive ones.

Update your career and development goals

It is a good idea to consider your dreams and goals for your career and formulate a number of career goals or development goals. Remember that opportunities for development can come from several places. This is what the 70-20-10 ratio is all about.

70% of your development should come from your job, 20% through a coach, a mentor or an experienced colleague, and only 10% through actual training and education. Therefore, consider how your development goals fit in. Be very specific at the personal development review - for instance by presenting specific ways for you to reach your goals.

What can you learn in your job? For example, if you want to be a manager, is there a student assistant you can be in charge of? Can you become a project manager – and perhaps take a project management course? Is there a manager who could be your coach?

Agree on concrete plans for your development

It is important that you are specific about your wishes. For example, if you want to go on a training programme, make it easy for your manager by outlining it:

• How much time it will take?
• What the company will get out of it?
• Who can take on the work tasks in the meantime?

Make sure you get in writing which new tasks you'll be taking on and which you'll be getting rid of so that your agreement is concrete and documented.

You may find that you and your manager have different interests. In this situation, you need to make a plan that both you and your manager are comfortable with so you can leave the old role and take on a new role in a sustainable way. Make sure to argue from the company's interests.

You can dive deeper into how to talk to your manager about skills development in this article: 

How to make time for continuing education

Be strategic with your requests

Think about how your requests and priorities fit into the company's strategy and goals, and you'll have a better chance of getting a positive response from your manager.

For example, if it has just been announced that there will be cutbacks, now may not be the time to ask for expensive further training.

However, you should always mention if something is preventing you from doing your job properly. If you are told that there is no way to solve the problem, and it is a very central element of your working life, then you may need to look for another job.

Hold on to your career goals

When you set your goals, it's important that you take responsibility for achieving them. However, you also need to be constructive if time passes and nothing happens. It's a good idea to start by finding out why you didn't achieve what you set out to do at your last performance review. If you generally feel that there's too much loose talk at the interview, stick to concretising your wishes and goals and say:

‘We talked about this last time, but nothing has happened yet, so what can we do to make something happen this time?’

If you realise that you can't achieve your goals, consider pursuing them in a different workplace.

What to say at your development review if you're thriving

A performance review is an alignment of expectations with your manager about where you are right now and where you want to go. If you're riding a wave where everything is going well and you want to continue in the same style, focus on that:

• Say you're doing well and what makes you feel good - both professionally and personally
• Make your results and contributions visible to your manager.

If you can get your manager to nod to what you do and are happy about, you can maintain it. This can be just as important as development initiatives. If you're at a point in your life where you are really busy, now may not be the time or energy for training and new roles, but simply for maintaining the status quo.

What can you achieve at your development review if you're going elsewhere?

If you want to change jobs and you're about to leave, it may not seem important to have an MUS interview.

But it's important that you still take the interview seriously, partly because you can't know how long it will take to make a job change. It's also easier to sell yourself into a new position if you're full of good energy.

Talk to your manager regularly throughout the year

It is important to talk about development and goals on an ongoing basis, otherwise you risk being forgotten in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

So talk to your manager regularly and don't save everything for the performance review, which, after all, only takes place once a year in most places.