Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis and I'm Helen Tupper and you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast. Every week we talk about a different topic to do with work and discuss practical ideas and actions to help you find your way through our increasingly squiggly world of work. And today we're going to be talking about how to prepare for an end of year review. This was a suggestion

from one of our listeners. I almost couldn't believe we'd not covered it before because it's

something that I think most of us have end of year reviews in some way, shape or form. I think

they've been changing a bit over the past few years, often for the better in terms of how we

approach them. But it's one of those things that sometimes

we dread, perhaps we really look forward to, we need to prepare for. So we thought we would talk

about some principles for how to approach that review and some specific action so that you feel

confident having those conversations with your manager. And we're sort of going to assume for today

that most people will be having these conversations with a manager. And we're sort of going to assume for today that

most people will be having these conversations with a manager. But of course, it could be

with a different colleague or with a mentor. And we're going to focus less today on doing the

reflection for yourself. And we did two podcast episodes, 114 and 115, where we did 20 career questions to ask yourself. So if you're

in kind of more, I want to reflect on my own year for myself, do some kind of good, deep thinking,

which sounds very appealing to me right now. I'd love to spend a bit of time doing that. I think

those podcast episodes will probably be more helpful. Today we're really going to focus on

that if you're having an end of year review with someone else probably as part of your organisation,

how that looks and feels. Hen and I both had loads of them over the years and we were thinking

about kind of the good, the bad and the ugly and what we've learnt, where they went well and

things we perhaps would have done differently in hindsight.

And if you want to dive a bit deeper into this topic, Sarah, not me, because I'll be doing something else, but Sarah will be hosting a pop-plus session and that will be nine o'clock Thursday,

December the 3rd. It's a 30-minute free session. We'll probably be drawing some models,

talking through some questions. If you've got reflections from this episode, it's a great community of learners to be part of.

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