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Letter of recommendation · annotated sample

LOR from a manager at work

How a work reference speaks to academic readiness, not only job performance.

Closest to you if your manager at work is writing your letter.

For Meera Iyer (fictional) · written by her engineering manager · 219 words

Notes reviewed by Ankit Jaiswal (M.Sc. Embedded Systems, TU Chemnitz · guiding Indian students since 2018) · September 2026

Fictional sample. Meera and every college, company and number here are invented. Learn from the structure, but write your own words: many universities check applications for copied text, and a borrowed story will not survive an interview question.

The document, with reviewer notes

[Company name and logo]

[Registered address] · [website]

20 January 2026

Note 1Company letterhead matters as much for a work reference as college letterhead does for an academic one.

To the Admissions Committee, M.Sc. Computer Science

Note 2Addressed to the programme.

I have managed Meera Iyer for two and a half years as Engineering Manager of the payments reconciliation team, where she is a senior backend engineer. In that time I have worked with her on design reviews, incident response and our team's hiring.

Note 3Role, duration and the contexts in which the manager saw the applicant work.

Meera led the move of our settlement reconciliation from a nightly batch job to an event-driven system. She wrote the design document, defended it in our architecture review, and carried it into production without a customer-facing incident. The change reduced the time to detect a mismatched settlement from about a day to fifteen minutes.

Note 4Confirms the achievement in the SOP from a second source, with the manager's view of how it was done.

What makes her unusual for an industry engineer is how she learns. After a difficult incident she will read the relevant research, write a short summary for the team, and change how we design the next service. Two of our current design guidelines began as her notes.

Note 5The key paragraph for a Master's application: it shows academic readiness through work behaviour. Without it, a professional letter reads like a job reference.

I have managed about forty engineers in my career, and I would place Meera in the top ten percent for technical depth. We will be sorry to lose her, and I support her decision to pursue a Master's without hesitation.

Note 6Comparative judgement with a stated base, plus explicit support for the decision to leave, which committees sometimes wonder about.

Yours sincerely,

[Signature and company stamp]
[Recommender name]
Engineering Manager
[Company name and address]
[work email address]

Note 7A work email on the company domain, so the university can verify the letter.

Before you borrow this structure

  • Check whether the programme accepts professional letters. Some ask for at least one academic letter.
  • Ask your manager to confirm dates, title and reporting line; the committee may compare them with your CV.
  • Remove confidential company details. A recommender should never share internal figures they are not allowed to.
  • Your recommender must write or fully review and sign the final letter.

Write your own version

Start from your own profile, not from Meera's.

Prepare a draft for your recommenderDownload as Word (free account)

The Word file includes these notes at the end, and a fill-in outline is there too.

Want an expert to read your draft? Application review: One final expert check of your application documents before you submit.

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