Structuring answers to competency questions

Your application and interview answers will of course vary depending on the particular question. However, regardless of the question, your structure should be clear. To maintain a strong structure, I would recommend drafting your application answers with temporary headings in place, just to ensure your answers remain logical and coherent from the outset (you can then delete these headings before submitting your answers). 

For example, if you are discussing your motivation for wanting to work at a particular firm, do not mention training at the start, in the middle and at the end of your answer. Perhaps have a section dedicated to the development of employees, thus avoiding the risk of repeating yourself and coming across as unable to write concisely and coherently. 

When discussing skills, competencies and strengths, the key is to give context before setting out the skills you have acquired, as this will make it easier to convince a recruiter that you actually developed the skills you mentioned. For example:

• You could start by stating “Whilst [position] at [organisation], my role involved [explain].
• Next, you could explain how your role helped you to “hone”, “develop”, “refine” or “demonstrate” specific skills.
• You could then elaborate more on your role and the skills you developed by stating “My role also involved [explain], which honed my [set out relevant skills]”. 
• Once you’ve discussed the role and skills in sufficient detail, you could move onto another experience by stating something like “I further developed these shills whilst carrying out [explain] at [name of organisation or society]”.

Note that using words such as “elected”, “selected” and “invited” can help to show that somebody else identified something special about you, and this led to them picking you over other people. This can help to give you credibility and set you apart from others.

It’s important that you consider your experiences, skills, abilities, strengths and weaknesses well in advance of writing applications and preparing for interviews. In particular, you need to think about all the experiences you have accumulated and then consider how these have helped you to develop the skills and strengths sought by the firms to which you are applying. 

Top tip: always consider whether the experiences you mention really demonstrate that you’ve developed the skills that you are highlighting. Don’t assume that a graduate recruiter will naturally draw the conclusion that a certain experience will automatically have resulted in you developing a particular skill. Accordingly, be sure to provide sufficient explanation about your roles where necessary to support your statements. Really spell it out.