Career growth requires continuous adaptation and development beyond experience alone. Yet without regular reflection, it can be difficult to identify the habits, strengths, and gaps that shape long-term success. In today’s FA Alpha Daily, we examine how self-evaluation can help financial advisors assess their progress, and identify opportunities for continued career development.
FA Alpha Daily:
Return Driven Strategy
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If you want to know if you’re on the right track in your career, then you should start looking inward…
Self-evaluation is a continuous process of looking back at one’s career performance through a careful evaluation of accomplishments, mistakes, and opportunities for growth.
Simply said, this process entails looking back AND within yourself to propel your career forward.
As a financial advisor, it’s crucial that you regularly review your career progression so you know how you can best reach your goals and serve your clients better.
According to Ivy Exec, evaluating oneself is beneficial for career development as this “broadens your soft skills, keeps you motivated, spurs on personal growth and development, and ensures you are meeting your goals.”
Aside from that, self-evaluation motivates you to keep doing better because you’ll be reflecting on your strengths, accomplishments, and other positive attributes.
As you assess yourself, you’ll notice how you can further grow in your profession and discover new ways of serving your clients better.
So… now that you understand the benefits of self-evaluation, let’s look at the different ways you can effectively evaluate yourself in terms of your career:
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Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals.
Making improvements after thoroughly looking back at your career and what you’ve achieved so far is part of the self-evaluation process. However, you need to make sure you set goals for yourself that you can realistically achieve and measure.
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Gather feedback from your colleagues and mentors.
When evaluating yourself, there’s a chance that you can overlook certain aspects of your career performance. Because of this, it’s important to seek feedback from your peers or superiors since they offer an external assessment of you as a professional.
After all, receiving feedback during the self-evaluation process gives you valuable insights, constructive criticisms, and encouragement about your career and work performance.
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Use a journal or tracker.
Using a journal or tracker allows you to take note of the challenges and realizations in your career or field of expertise.
You can journal with a physical notebook, spreadsheet, or mobile app. Notion is an example of a productivity tool that has free journaling templates you can use.
Self-evaluation and Career Driven Strategy (CDS)
CDS (Return Driven Strategy’s tenets and foundations, but applied to one’s career), emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions and thinking differently about your goals and activities in your career.
Self-evaluation enables you to assess your performance and gather feedback about your work, paving the way for you to grow and improve as a professional (or in this context, as a financial advisor).
By undergoing this process, you’re putting yourself in a position to learn new skills and set new goals, furthering your growth not just as a professional, but also as an individual.
So, wherever you’re at in your career, take note of the power of self-evaluation in helping you realize how far you’ve come and how much more you can grow!
Best regards,
Joel Litman & Rob Spivey
Chief Investment Officer &
Director of Research
at Valens Research
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