Articulating Your Skills – STAR Framework

Articulating your skills is itself an invaluable skill. It is something you will make use of again and again as you progress through the modules in this course. It will help you build a resume, write a cover letter, and prepare for an interview.

So far you should have taken an inventory of your skills, identified your strengths and weaknesses, and begun to consider the ways in which some of those skills might be transferable to Digital Technologies.

In this part of the module, you are going to learn how to articulate those skills in a way that makes sense to and gets a positive response from employers.

Simply listing your skills is helpful, but the best way to show that you have in fact developed certain skills is to prove it with evidence: You talk about a time when you put those skills to work.

The STAR Framework

Knowing how to best articulate your skills will help you throughout your career, from writing a resume to networking effectively to answering tough job interview questions. It begins with using the STAR framework. STAR is an acronym that stands for:

• Situation: What was the situation?
• Task: What was your task?
• Action: What action did you take?
• Result: What was the result?

Using the STAR framework ensures that you demonstrate the skills you have in a clear and focused manner. It provides an opportunity to articulate your skills and form a foundation that prepares you to answer behavioural questions during job interviews. Becoming familiar with the STAR framework will be especially useful when writing resumes, cover letters, and preparing for interviews.

Accomplishment Statements

Now that you are familiar with the STAR framework, let’s talk about accomplishment statements. An accomplishment statement is your STAR story distilled down into one phrase. Here is the simple formula for an accomplishment statement:

In one phrase, an accomplishment statement explains…

• The action you took (Verb),
• Under what circumstances (Context), and
• The positive outcome (Result).

Let’s say you want an accomplishment statement to support your organization skills, accuracy, and/or database skills. You think of an example: You had to track business contacts (context), and so you organized (verb) a database, and you were commended for its accuracy (result). Your accomplishment statement could be “Organized database to track business contracts and was commended for accuracy”.

Replace all text between the “Verb/Context/Positive Result” graphic and the Portfolio Activity with this:

Here are some more examples of accomplishment statements:

• Welcomed customers in a friendly manner and provided clear directions for locating products
• Flexibly handled multiple projects at the same time, leading to improved office efficiency
• Interacted with diverse customers on a regular basis, providing personalized service