A competency could be knowledge, attitudes, skills, values or behaviours which can be acquired through talent, experience or training.
Ideally, examples should be from your workplace experiences but can include voluntary work, sports and social activities, family life, education etc.
A good way of answering competency based questions is by using the CAR approach. CAR stands for Context, Action and Result.
Context |
Forms an introduction, describing the scenario you faced, date and place. |
Action |
What action did you take? Try not to focus on what the group or team did without making clear what your own contribution was. |
Result |
Forms the conclusion. What results did you achieve? What did you learn from the experience? |
Example:
Context |
In my current role, I tend to have lots of competing deadlines and found that as a result, some deadlines were not being achieved. |
Action |
I decided to review my work practices, and suggested implementing a ‘traffic light’ prioritisation system; labelling tasks as red, amber or green depending upon their urgency. |
Result |
My ideas were accepted and implemented by my whole team, and I now find that I (and my colleagues) are now managing to hit 100% of our deadlines. |