EngineerHer

Anyone reading that title is likely to be thinking I’ve lost my mind. It’s obvious to a lot of people that quarter four is indeed here. It’s October after all.

But have you thought about this properly yet?

There’s less than three months til the end of the year. 80 days left til Christmas. Not shopping days, mind you, just days days.

And while I’m not usually over concerned with goals and targets and things, if you are looking to either move roles or pursue promotion, either internally or externally to your organisation – now is a key time to start getting organised.

The business performance year is not 12months long

Anyone who has been part of the performance review cycle already knows this. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the corporate goals cascaded down by about February time. If you’re lucky. There have been times, I’ve still been waiting in June – but those were very bad days. And while you may think the corporate goals don’t have much to do with you -I’ll explain later why they absolutely do.

Added to that, the performance for most people is coloured in by about November time. Trust me. This is to allow the chance for all the layers of management throughout the corporation or multi national or whatever to align on what good looks like.

Seriously.

People have to be careful that the effort and work required to gain a good rating is roughly the same across the business.

And that is an annual battle, as managers across the world make the case for their teams. (And if they’re not battling for that, I question what they’re doing as managers, to be honest. Also – to my own boss – fair warning, ok?)

But that means that at best you have 9-10 months to complete your goals. Which means now is a good time to dust them off, figure out how accurate and valuable the goals still are and start composing your end of year feedback on said goals.

This doesn’t mean you have failed if you haven’t completed the goal by the end of October. There are two months left in the year. But, it does mean you need to show significant progress in those goals so it’s obvious you will complete the damn things by the end of the year.

Now’s the time you start thinking about next year

Yeah, I know. You’re thinking about all the end of year reports, reviews, nights out, shopping, spending, all the rest of it you have to get done before the end of the year. I get it.

But now is also an excellent time to start reviewing your own year. (If you’re not sure where to start, I have a free, simple resources to help you out. You can download that here)

Even if you don’t want to take advantage of that workbook, it’s a good time of the year to start a review process. If you’ve never done a review before for yourself like this, here are four key questions to ask yourself:

• What worked for me this year?
• What didn’t work for me this year?
• What will I keep doing after this year?
• What will I change next year?

Now, these are four really simple questions, but they’re quite powerful when you think about them.

What worked for me this year?

What went well?

Where did I succeed easily?

What relationships panned out?

And seriously – write out the answers. It’s easier of course, if you’re in the habit of doing this on a weekly or month basis anyway. Even quarterly helps. But we don’t all have time or incentive to do that. So let’s do it annually at the very least. And you can take your time over it.

Ideally of course, you’d be heading off to a nice hotel, treat yourself to a spa day or a golf day or a whiskey tasting experience, or something that makes it a treat for you. But in reality, not everyone can afford to do that. Kids have a habit of still needing to be fed and watered, bills need to be paid, etc, etc.

But I encourage you to at least sit down with a cuppa for a series of half hours and work through the year, thinking about what worked and what didn’t.

And it’s amazing how the mere look at a particular week’s diary on Outlook can help bring back the good, the bad and the ugly… trust me.

What didn’t work for me this year?

This is critical. Because while there are times that we can look back with rose tinted glasses, we also need to be aware of what categorically didn’t work.

For example – I know there is a PM coming towards me to get some sign offs on next year’s budget soon. That’s because last year, I waited far too long and we were a few months at the start of the year struggling a bit. So, I put something in place. And this year, hopefully, the process will be smoother and less fraught…

Now that was something I took action on at the time, but I know there will be other things that I have yet to deal with and I will only catch them by a review of the year.

It could be massive, like you don’t get on with your boss or the job just plain doesn’t suit you. The job market in Ireland right now is fairly hopping for engineers, so it’s a good time to go looking if you’re interested in that kind of a change. Plus ringing a few recruiters doesn’t really hurt.

But by asking yourself what didn’t work for me this year and more importantly, answer the question honestly, even if only to yourself, you can move forward into 2026 with a plan for change.

What will I keep doing?

These are the things you can see are costing time, energy or money but there is a good enough pay off to continue doing them. My extremely intermittent gym visits fit on this list. I will continue with them. I will keep doing them.

Just, y’know, not on any sort of recongisable schedule or anything…

But it’s important to think of what is important and useful enough to continue doing for the year. Is there a meeting you’re attending that, really, other people are not suited to attend for now? (no matter how much you’d wish otherwise…)

Are there tasks that ok, might not technically fall within your remit and other people could do them, but actually, they are tasks you really enjoy and it’s a small ray of sunshine on the bad days?

Have you difficult presentations on a regular basis but they get your face in front of the right people and allow you to have that vital 2min chat with a senior manager?

What are the important things in your life that you will need to keep doing to achieve your longer term goals?

(Regular deposits to savings accounts, pensions, etc also fall in this bucket, usually)

What will I change next year?

I mean, there are things that you might keep doing, but also change slightly.

Those gym visits of mine? Probably will be getting those on some sort of schedule next year.

You might consider changing the amount you’re putting into pension or savings, depending on your financial situation.

Maybe some of those tasks that you do for fun might be better off given to someone else, but you need to mentor them through the first few months.

You spend more time on reading business articles, rather than engineering articles.

You spend time speaking to key people around site, to build relationships instead of focusing on people you already know.

Quarter four is here, whether we like it or not…

On my spiritual blog, I say the time between Samhain and Imbolc (Nov – Feb for those not in tune with the Irish fire festivals) is for dreaming and planning.

And I kinda use the dark times of the year for this in my career and business life as well.

Taking stock and doing a review is step one, and I’ve gone through that in detail above. But then you need to go further.

• What are your career goals for next year?
• What courses or conferences do you want to attend?
• What learning do you want to do?
• What responsibilities do you want to shed and what new ones are you taking up?

And yeah, ok, you might not have full control over any of this. But if you don’t know what you want, then you don’t have a hope of gaining it!

Next week, I’ll take you through the next step. Moving from review to planning…