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Draft a self-assessment with the Career agent

Review season doesn't have to mean staring at a blank box trying to remember what you did in March. Point the Career agent at your year's work and get a first-draft self-assessment — accomplishments, impact, and growth — that you edit instead of author.

Stage: First-Party Agents · For: End user, Manager · Level: Starter · Time: 15 min

Status: Check current status — this agent isn't individually listed on the Agents in Microsoft 365 roster; confirm availability there before assuming it's GA.

When to use this

It's review time and the hardest part is remembering. Real impact from eight months ago has evaporated from memory, and the blank self-assessment form is doing you no favors. The Career agent is a newer first-party capability designed to help you reflect and grow — and one of its most practical uses is turning the trail of your work into a structured, honest self-assessment draft you can refine.

Use it when you'd rather edit a thoughtful first draft than write one from nothing.

What you'll need

  • M365 Copilot license with the Career capability enabled in your org (it draws on your Microsoft 365 activity and anything you tell it)
  • Your goals or review template for the period, if you have one
  • A few pointers to your year — key projects, wins, and a couple of things that didn't go to plan

Try it now — the prompt

Open the Career agent and give it the shape of the review plus the highlights it can't infer:

Help me draft my self-assessment for this review period. My goals were [paste or
summarize]. Major things I worked on: [list 4–6 projects/outcomes]. For each, capture
what I did, the impact (with numbers where you can), and what I learned. Then add a
short "areas I'm growing in" section that's honest, not self-critical. Match the tone
to a professional performance review.

Why this works: the agent can surface activity, but you know which work mattered. Feeding it your goals, the handful of outcomes that count, and asking for impact + learning per item produces a draft that sounds like you and stands up in a review — instead of a generic activity dump.

Step by step

  1. Open the Career agent. Find it in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app or your Viva growth experience, wherever your org surfaced career tools.
  2. Give it your goals and your highlights. Paste the review template or your goals, and list the projects that defined your period. The agent organizes and expands; you supply the judgment of what mattered.
  3. Read the draft critically. Check that the impact statements are true and specific — replace any vague claim with a real number or example. This is the step that makes a self-assessment credible.
  4. Refine the framing: 
    Make the impact statements more concrete, tie each accomplishment back to one of
my goals, and soften the "areas I'm growing in" so it reads as forward-looking.
    The agent reshapes it; you keep ownership of every claim.

Screenshots

We deliberately don't ship screenshots that go stale — the Microsoft Copilot UI changes often. Follow the numbered steps above, which we keep current. Maintainers can regenerate fresh captures with the Playwright tool in tooling/screenshots/.

Make it better

A draft is the floor, not the ceiling: - Pull the evidence. "For each accomplishment, suggest where I'd find proof — a doc, a metric, a thread — to back it up." - Prep for the conversation. "Turn this into three talking points for my review meeting and two questions to ask about my growth." - Write the manager version. Managers: "Draft a balanced summary of this person's period from these inputs, ready for me to edit."

📚 Learn more. The Agents in Microsoft 365 hub describes the growth and career capabilities, and Microsoft Viva documents how Copilot supports employee growth across Microsoft 365.

Watch out for

  • Every claim is yours to verify. The agent drafts; you own accuracy. Never submit an impact statement you can't back up — overstated numbers are worse than none.
  • It can't read what it can't see. Work outside Microsoft 365, or done verbally, won't surface — feed those in yourself.
  • Availability varies. The Career capability depends on your org's configuration. If you don't see it, the same structured prompt works in Copilot Chat with your inputs.

Where this leads (the ramp)

You've now used first-party agents to brief, refine, plan, and reflect. The natural next question is bigger: can Copilot run a whole multi-step task for me, end to end? That's Stage 3 · Cowork.

Next: Cowork → Hand off an end-to-end task to Cowork

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