How to Write an EPR

Your responsibility in writing an EPR depends on whether you're the ratee or the rater. If you're the ratee, your only requirement is to provide good material.

What is good material? What kind of information is the rater looking for?

Besides the obvious administrative information, the ratee must provide a list of achievements that justify a particular rating. It's sort of a chicken and egg kind of thing. The rater usually develops an opinion of the person he's writing on over time and has an idea of what rating he wants to assign before the ratee provides his or her summary of accomplishments. The rater pretty much knows what score the ratee will get even before he's presented with the ratee's list of accomplishments. Yet the subordinate must proceed as if the list he's preparing will affect his score. The thinking is that if he can pull together an impressive enough list of epr bullets, he'll be pretty much ensuring an overall 5 or better.

It's a fairly dishonest and dysfunctional way to go about rating an individual. The ratee is told to provide the best material he can –implying that it will support a higher score –while the supervisor often has no plans to change his mind on the ratee's performance or score.

But even though this cynical view may occasionally be true, most of the time, the supervisor does have the ratee's best interest in mind and asks for inputs so that he can justify the best score possible. Because a good score has to be supported by good EPR bullets.

Good EPR bullets are statements that demonstrate competency. They must not only illustrate competency, they must be understandable by people who are not members of your career field or Squadron.

Your EPR is a summary of your performance and capability and will be reviewed throughout your career by Senior NCOs from a variety of career fields for several purposes. To be competitive, the reviewers must be able to understand why your accomplishment exceeds standards, is impressive, executed better then your peers, etc. If your bullets aren't understandable, they might as well not exist.

In order to be competitive, bullet statements taken together should demonstrate growth. They should describe increased responsibility and professional growth since the last EPR.