How to Give Feedback on Junior Work That Actually Helps

Reviewing a junior person's work is harder than reviewing a peer's. The gap between what they produced and what good looks like is wide enough that naming all of it would be crushing, and naming none of it is useless.

Most reviewers resolve this by being kind and vague. "Good structure, keep developing your analysis." Nobody can act on that.

Be specific about the work, not the person

"Your analysis is weak" is about them. "The analysis states a 30% improvement without saying what it's measured against" is about the work, and it can be fixed this afternoon.

The second is also easier to hear, which is a useful side effect rather than the point. The point is that it identifies a thing that exists in the document.

Name what's missing, not just what's wrong

Junior work usually fails by omission. The trade-off that wasn't costed, the alternative that wasn't considered, the metric that would tell you whether it worked. These absences are invisible to someone who hasn't yet learned to look for them, which is exactly why naming them is the most valuable thing you can do.

Distinguish a habit from a capability

Some gaps are things they haven't learned to do yet. Others are things they can't yet do. These require completely different responses, and conflating them is how people get discouraged out of careers they'd be good at.

"You didn't attach a number to this claim" is a habit — nameable, fixable, probably fixed next time. "The reasoning doesn't hold together" is a capability gap, and needs a different conversation.

Say which one you think it is. It changes how the feedback lands, and how they spend the next month.

Praise precisely or not at all

Vague praise is worse than no praise, because it teaches nothing and devalues the specific praise that follows. "Good job" tells them nothing about what to repeat.

"You framed the problem before proposing a solution, which most people at this stage don't do" tells them exactly which behaviour to keep.

Write for the person, not the file

The evaluation will be read by a nervous 21-year-old who paid for it, not by a committee. Write to them. Say what you saw, what it means, and what you'd do next if you were them.

The best feedback a junior person receives is usually the first time somebody told them the truth in a way they could use. It is worth the extra fifteen minutes.