OER Achieves Block Examples for Company-Grade Officers

Captain Martinez has three weeks until her OER closes. She's filled in the administrative blocks, checked the dates, and confirmed the rater signatures. Now she's staring at Part IVb — the Achieves block — with a long list of things she did and no idea how to make any of them look like what a promotion board actually wants to see. She knows she had a good year: led her company through a live-fire rotation, ran the battalion's MDMP process for a brigade exercise, and held 97% personnel strength during a period when the unit next door was losing soldiers every week. The problem isn't what she did. The problem is translating it into language that makes a board member, reading the file cold for the first time, put her in the top 10% of her year group.

That's the actual challenge of the Achieves block.

What DA Form 67-10-1 is asking

The company-grade OER (DA Form 67-10-1) covers O1 through O3 and WO1 through CW2. Part IVb asks raters to describe "the degree to which the officer achieved unit/organizational goals and progress toward Army and organizational goals." That language is intentionally broad — which is exactly why most Achieves blocks end up weak.

In practice, promotion boards are scanning for three things:

1. Measurable outcomes — numbers, percentages, unit rankings, deadlines met or beaten
2. Scope of impact — did this affect the officer's platoon, the whole battalion, or something higher?
3. Attribution — did the rated officer's decisions and actions cause the result, or would the unit have gotten there regardless?

A block that hits all three will consistently outperform one that covers only "what happened."

The single most common mistake

The most common failure in Achieves bullets is describing activity instead of results.

"Conducted extensive training on crew drills" tells a board what the officer did on Tuesdays. "Raised platoon qualification rate from 67% to 94% in 11 weeks" tells the board whether it worked.

The second most common mistake is burying the headline. The first bullet in the Achieves block is prime real estate — it should lead with the biggest, most concrete outcome from the rating period. Officers routinely waste that position on setup language and save the strongest number for the third or fourth bullet, where it gets lost.

Weak vs. strong: four common scenarios

Scenario 1: Gunnery and weapons qualification

Weak:

• Supervised training and qualification events for platoon; all personnel participated in gunnery

Why it fails: "All personnel participated" is a headcount, not an outcome. It tells the board the officer was present, not what they produced. A participation rate has essentially no floor — even a unit in crisis can get 100% of its people to show up to the range.

Strong:

• Led 2d Platoon to 100% crew qualification at Table VI gunnery; only PLT in 1-66 AR to achieve zero marginal crews across two rotations; raised platoon GO rate 23 percentage points over prior-year results

Why it works: It names the specific training event, provides a comparison against every other platoon in the battalion, and anchors the improvement to a prior-year baseline so the progress is visible. The board now knows what happened, how it compared to peers, and that it was better than before — three different vectors of evidence for the same outcome.

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Scenario 2: Staff work at battalion or brigade level

Weak:

• Assisted with MDMP process for exercise IRON SWORD; contributed to planning products

Why it fails: "Assisted" and "contributed" are near-invisible words on an OER. They place the officer in a supporting role without naming what they owned or what came of it.

Strong:

• Served as primary author of battalion OPORD for exercise IRON SWORD (3,200-soldier, multi-nation exercise); delivered complete OPORD 72 hours ahead of WARNO suspense; brigade S3 cited product as "most complete submission received" from any subordinate battalion

Why it works: It names the scale of the exercise, claims specific authorship rather than participation, quantifies the timeline advantage, and includes an external validator from the level above the battalion. A brigade S3's direct recognition is not something every captain accumulates — it signals to a board that someone outside the chain of command noticed.

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Scenario 3: Readiness and unit metrics

Weak:

• Maintained high personnel and equipment readiness throughout the rating period

Why it fails: "High" is undefined. Boards have no frame of reference. This bullet communicates that nothing catastrophically failed — which is barely above silence. Every officer who doesn't go through a relief for cause could technically make this claim.

Strong:

• Sustained Alpha Company at 94% personnel strength and 91% equipment MC rate across 14-month rating period; exceeded battalion average by 8 and 11 points respectively; zero reportable readiness failures submitted to higher HQ

Why it works: "94%" and "91%" define "high." The battalion comparison turns an isolated number into a ranking. "Zero reportable failures" is itself a meaningful outcome — it means the officer's unit never created a data point that traveled up to brigade or above.

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Scenario 4: Training management and soldier development

Weak:

• Took responsibility for platoon training and ensured all soldiers maintained proficiency

Why it fails: This is a job description, not an outcome. Every lieutenant "takes responsibility for platoon training." The bullet says nothing about whether the training worked or whether it was better than what any other lieutenant in the battalion produced.

Strong:

• Redesigned 1st Platoon's 90-day training cycle to integrate MOS-T individual tasks into collective events; achieved 100% APFT-equivalent and weapons qualification compliance before Q4 JRTC rotation; zero soldiers flagged for training deficiencies during JRTC in-processing

Why it works: It names the specific action the officer took (redesigned the training cycle — a decision, not just execution), ties it to two measurable compliance results, and validates those results through an external gate: JRTC in-processing. The unit's pre-rotation preparation was tested by people outside the chain of command, and it passed.

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A repeatable structure for Achieves bullets

Strong Achieves bullets generally follow this pattern:

[Action verb] + [what you specifically owned] + [quantified result] + [comparison or external validator]

If you can't fill in all four slots, the bullet isn't ready yet. A missing "quantified result" usually means you need to pull actual data — check the unit readiness tracker, the DTMS report, the physical fitness record, or the training calendar. If numbers genuinely don't exist for your role, use a ranked comparison ("top-performing section of four in the battery") or an external validator (an award, a selection to a competitive school, a senior leader's written recognition).

For roles where hard metrics are hard to come by, the approach in our guide on quantifying accomplishments without hard numbers works just as well for OER bullets as it does for any other evaluation format.

Why company-grade is different from field-grade

On DA Form 67-10-2 and 67-10-3 (field-grade OERs for O4–O6), the Achieves block language shifts to emphasize organizational-level impact — corps, division, or installation outcomes rather than company or battalion ones. Company-grade raters and rated officers sometimes make the mistake of writing Achieves bullets that read like field-grade language, with heavy references to "strategic" impact when the actual work was platoon-level. That sounds inflated and boards notice it.

Write to the scope of what the officer actually owned. A platoon leader's Achieves block should reflect what a platoon leader can credibly own and influence. A captain commanding a company can go bigger — the full formation, the garrison programs, the unit's external-facing performance metrics. Don't reach past what the grade can realistically claim.

The rater's summary line

The last thing most raters write — and often the most important sentence in the entire block — is the evaluation summary: the promotion recommendation and narrative sentence at the bottom of Part IVb. This is where "Best Qualified," "Highly Qualified," or "Most Qualified" appears, and where the rater states where the officer ranks relative to their peers.

Don't let this line be an afterthought. A strong Achieves block should set up the summary line so the conclusion is obvious. If the bullets collectively justify "top 10% of all company-grade officers I've rated," the summary line should name that comparison and recommend a specific next assignment or school selection. Work backward: what does the rater need to have demonstrated in the bullets to make "top 10%" feel earned? That's the bar the Achieves block needs to clear.

The same principle applies to NCO evaluations — if you're also working through NCOER bullets this cycle, the NCOER bullet examples by box guide covers the parallel Achieves box for sergeants through command sergeants major.

Before you finalize the draft

• Every bullet leads with an action verb — not a noun phrase, not "was responsible for"
• At least one bullet contains a number or percentage
• At least one bullet names an external reference (an exercise, an evaluation, a selection board) rather than only internal self-assessment
• The rater's summary line is more specific than "promote with peers" — it names a ranking or a comparison group
• No bullet is longer than one printed line on the form (truncation on the printed DA Form is a common and avoidable submission error)

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RapidEPR generates Achieves bullets from a few rough notes — you describe what happened in plain language, and it returns polished, verb-led Army writing. When PCS season or the end-of-year OER push is bearing down, that's the difference between a polished draft and a rushed one.

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