If you’ve attended any of our Taking Charge of NSPS Workshops, you know we are adamant in saying that writing strong self-assessments or objectives does not require fancy, poetic, or journalistic styled writing. In fact the NSPS rules and pay pools don’t even expect that you write perfectly structured, grammatically correct sentences. Of course they want it to be clear and complete thoughts, but “great” writing is not what they are looking for.
What they ARE looking for is that you adequately express and articulate yourself so they can determine how well you performed. We have coached plenty of people who have spent so much time focused on word-smithing that they lose any sense of brevity and practicality. Those who read it then think, it sounds really good, but what did they actually do or accomplish.
Your job in writing a self-assessment is to clearly and concisely articulate to the pay pool panel what you did and the results of your work. Put simply, you must describe how carrying out a task yielded results that added value or impact to the organization.