Brag documents are an effective way to get recognized by your manager and peers for your work. It will help you to get promoted or simply get a salary raise. Getting a template and what to write into that is difficult, that is why we have prepared some templates for you. All of the templates are free and can be accessed via Google Docs.

You might be a startup that is trying to set up their performance evaluation processes to finally create alignment for leveling and ranking within the company, or simply a worker who wants to get a promotion. A brag document can help to convince your manager to get promoted.

How to work with the templates

1. Open the URL of the template, you can find them in the next chapters
2. Press on File → Make a copy
3. Fill the document with your data
4. Send it to your manager, ideally discuss it in a 1-on-1 meeting and see if you can reach for the promotion

Brag Document Template #1: The general one

Template Link: "Brag Document Template 1: For Everyone"

This brag document is made for every profession. After a short introduction on where you describe yourself in a short profile, you will jump over to defining the goals from past years. If you do not know what goals you had a year ago, feel free to write down what the company’s goals were.

Once those are written down it is time to think about your past year’s performance. What tasks have you done that impacted the key metrics of the company? Most people struggle with this but think back, month by month what you have done.

Then write down what the situation was, without describing what you have done and how the situation was impacted. All that and you will have a good overview of what your performance looked like.

Brag Document Template #2: Software Engineers & More

Template Link: "Brag Document Template 2: Software Engineers & Tech"

This brag document is specially made for Software Engineers but can be used for other professions as well. It is also written based on the popular article "Get your work recognized: write a brag document" by Julia Evans. It will go through your Goals, Projects, how you have collaborated with colleagues and how you progressed the company. Overall it is super focused on software engineers that have clear projects on what they work on and surely this cannot be found in every job that is out there, but if you have some structured way of working towards some KPIs this template might be for you.

The only chapter that does apply to Software Engineers is "Design & documentation". Ideally, you skip this chapter from the template to make it a generic one that works for everyone. But in general, this template is really popular as it was featured on Hackernews with more than 300 upvotes.

Brag Document Template #3: Based on Leadership Principles

Template Link: "Brag Document Template 3: Leadership Principles"

This brag document template is the best if your company works with Leadership Principles, also called operation principles in some companies. You can find a big selection of leadership principles in our free Career Ladders Explorer.

The template is structured quite simply. You have three sections that are like the following:

• Good Leadership Principles/Actions
• Room to improve based on Leadership Principles
• Outlook

The important thing to consider in this template is to overweight the good parts and leave out the bad things. Ideally, you should have started with listing "okish" achievements and getting to the best achievements, then starting with the worst parts where you need to improve and top it off with improvements that are possible for you to reach in the next performance review cycle.

In the final self-evaluation section try to focus on reasons why you should get promoted. Most of the time the main reason should be that you act on the next level already when it comes to leadership principles. And write as well that you want to get promoted now, because of all your achievements and your output.

Other brag docs

Do you have any other brag documents that you want to share? Feel free to shoot us an email at: getworkrecognized@gmail.com. We are happy to have your template listed here as well and we are looking to extend this collection of brag documents soon.