For college students, it is just not your professor or your supervisor who can give you constructive feedback to grow and improve. You, too, can give constructive feedback to fellow students working together on team projects, work colleagues, and even friends. But how do you give feedback so that it’s heard in the manner it was intended, minimizing defensiveness?
One effective and easily memorable approach for giving constructive feedback is the sandwich technique. It has three parts.
- First, start with a positive affirming statement (the bottom of the bun).
- Second, provide your constructive feedback (the meat or veggies).
- Third, end with a positive, affirming statement (the top of the bun).
For example, what would be your constructive feedback to your friend if she asked you to give her feedback on her resume? She came to you because you just worked with your coach to polish yours, and you’re feeling pretty good about the improvements you made. Your friend gave you plenty of time to review the resume, and in doing so, you noticed it was missing strong action verbs, the formatting made it look too busy, and it had a few typos.
Using the sandwich technique, your constructive feedback could be something like this:
- You have so much great experience captured on your resume! (bottom of the bun)
- I think it could be made even stronger if you made three types of changes. The first change is to use action verbs so your experience can stand out even more. For example, consider substituting “responsible for” and inserting “led”. We can go through more examples if that would be helpful. Second, your resume will look less busy by changing the formatting to include more white space between headings and using one-inch margins. There are some great examples on this website if you’d like to explore other ways to make your resume look less busy. Finally, it’s always helpful to have someone else review your resume to identify typos. I found these four… (the meat or veggies).
- I can see that you’ve been working hard on your resume and think that making these revisions will result in one that’s going to impress potential employers. (top of the bun)
Constructive feedback is a gift to others and the important skill of giving it can be learned and even perfected with practice.
