APS5 pitch writing and selection criteria examples.

I supervise staff with a focus on building their capability for the next level of work, not just maintaining current performance (restate the criterion). In my current role as a Senior Project Officer with a federal regulatory agency, I formally supervise three direct reports — two APS3s and one APS4 — and informally coordinate the work of two APS2 trainees on rotation through our team (situation). The team had a track record of high turnover, with most APS3s moving on within 14 months either to other agencies or to APS4 roles elsewhere, which created a continuous training burden (task).

I built each direct report a 12-month development plan in the first month of supervising them, mapped against the work level standards for the level above their current position. For each, I identified two stretch assignments — pieces of APS4-shaped work my APS3s could own, and APS5-shaped work my APS4 could lead. I scheduled fortnightly one-on-ones structured around their work rather than mine, so they had time to raise issues without competing with my agenda. When one APS3 was underperforming on accuracy, I addressed it directly within four weeks rather than letting it slide to performance review — with a clear plan, specific feedback against the work level standards, and a check-in at six weeks. I made a point of nominating my reports for development opportunities outside our team, even where it might mean losing them earlier (actions).

Both APS3s were promoted to APS4 within the development period — one internally, one to another agency — and the APS4 is currently acting at APS5. Annual engagement scores for my direct reports were the highest in the branch, and our Director has asked me to coordinate supervisory practice across the broader team (result).

I manage stakeholder relationships across diverse internal and external counterparts, including in situations where their priorities do not align (restate the criterion). In my current role, I coordinate the delivery of a federally funded grants program across four state-based delivery partners (situation). Last financial year, two of the partners raised concerns about a change to reporting requirements at the same time as the program area was being asked to demonstrate tighter compliance to the Department's Senior Executive (task).

I worked through the two concerns separately rather than treating them as one issue, because the underlying problems were different — one partner had a genuine workflow constraint, the other was pushing back on the principle. For the workflow concern, I sat down with the partner's program manager and mapped how the new reporting requirements would fit into their existing process, which led me to propose a small change to the reporting template that met our compliance need without doubling their work. For the principled pushback, I escalated to my Director with a clear summary of the partner's position, my read of whether it was negotiable, and a recommendation. I made sure both partners understood the rationale for the new requirements, not just the requirements themselves — without that, future requests would have been harder to land. I kept my Director appraised at each step rather than presenting a resolved problem at the end (actions).

The new reporting requirements were implemented across all four partners on schedule, and our compliance metrics for the program improved to the level the Senior Executive had requested. Both of the partners that had raised concerns participated in the program redesign for the following financial year — including the one that had pushed back on principle (result).

I apply considered judgement to complex matters and determine appropriate courses of action with limited day-to-day supervision (restate the criterion). In my current role, I am responsible for handling complex case referrals that fall outside the standard processing pathway — typically because they involve genuine policy ambiguity, multiple competing factors, or sensitive client circumstances (situation). Last year I handled around 45 of these referrals (task).

For each, I follow the same approach. I work through the position description and the relevant policy guidance to identify what the actual rule is, separating it from how it has been applied informally over time — the two often diverge. I look at recent decisions on comparable cases to understand how the rule has been interpreted in practice. I identify the dimensions of the current case that are genuinely novel versus the dimensions that map cleanly to precedent. I form a tentative position before consulting anyone else, because I find I evaluate other perspectives better when I have my own view to test them against. When I escalate to my Director, I present a recommendation rather than an open question — she has scarce time, and forcing her to do the analysis I have already done is poor stewardship of it. If the case involves client harm or potential reputational risk for the agency, I escalate before forming my own view, not after (actions).

My recommendations have been accepted without amendment in 38 of the 45 referrals over the past year. In the seven cases where my Director took a different position, I have learned more from her reasoning than I would have from her routine sign-off, which has refined my judgement on subsequent matters (result).

I identify procedural improvements where they will produce meaningful efficiency or quality gains, and I implement them in ways that stick rather than reverting once the immediate driver fades (restate the criterion). In my current role, our team handles a quarterly stakeholder consultation cycle that consistently consumed around 40% of the team's capacity in the two weeks before each deadline, against a budget of 25% (situation). The overrun had been treated as inevitable for three consecutive cycles (task).

I mapped the consultation process end-to-end, identifying where time was actually being spent rather than where the official process said it should be spent. The single largest drain was reformatting partner submissions that arrived in inconsistent formats, even though we had a template — partners weren't using it because the template was a Word document that didn't match their internal systems. I designed a single-page web form that captured the same data in the same structure, sent it to three partners for testing, and refined it based on their feedback. I documented the new process clearly enough that anyone in the team could run it, and built in a manual override for the rare cases where the form would not work. I rolled it out with a short Teams briefing for partners explaining what had changed and why — that ten-minute investment in context substantially reduced friction in adoption. I scheduled a six-month check-in to confirm the change had not introduced new problems (actions).

The following consultation cycle consumed 23% of team capacity, inside the original budget for the first time in four cycles. The web form approach has been adopted by two adjacent teams handling similar consultation processes (result).

I communicate effectively across a range of audiences, including senior internal stakeholders and external parties at varying levels of seniority (restate the criterion). In my current role, I prepare regular briefings for our Branch Manager on the status of complex casework and emerging risks (situation), alongside quarterly summary papers that go to the Senior Executive for noting (task).

For briefings to the Branch Manager, I write to a structure she has told me she values: the issue in one sentence, the recommendation in one sentence, the rationale in two or three sentences, the risks in a bulleted list. Nothing else. She can ask if she wants more, but I never make her wade through three pages to find what I think she should do. For the quarterly Senior Executive papers, I write differently — longer, more contextual, more explicit about precedent and dependencies, because that audience reads more papers per day and may not have the immediate context my Branch Manager has. I write the executive summary last, after I know what the paper actually says. I send drafts to one colleague for a fresh read before submission, because I have learned my own second-pass review catches less than someone else's first-pass read. When I speak to senior stakeholders on the phone, I prepare three things in advance — the question I want answered, the decision I need them to make, and the one piece of context they need to make it. Anything beyond those three is bonus (actions).

Both my Branch Manager and the Senior Executive review have provided unsolicited positive feedback on the clarity of my briefings over the past year. Two of my briefings have been used as templates by other Senior Project Officers in the branch (result).

I deliver complex work to required standards and timeframes, including coordinating inputs from multiple internal and external contributors (restate the criterion). In my current role I was assigned ownership of the agency's annual program evaluation report, a 60-page document covering program outcomes, financial performance, and forward planning (situation). The report draws on inputs from six internal teams and three external delivery partners, has a hard deadline driven by the Department's annual reporting cycle, and the previous year's report had been delivered two weeks late (task).

I started by mapping every contributing input against the deadline working backwards — what each contributor needed to deliver, when, and with what dependencies on inputs from others. I shared the plan with each contributor within the first fortnight so they could raise capacity issues early rather than two weeks before deadline. I built in a fortnight of buffer between the latest input arrival and the deadline, knowing from the previous year that the buffer would be needed. I held a weekly 30-minute Teams stand-up across the contributors during the production period — structured tightly to keep it useful, not a status meeting for status's sake. When two contributors were tracking late by the four-week mark, I escalated to my Director with a specific request rather than just flagging the issue. I drafted my own sections in parallel with waiting for inputs rather than sequentially, which compressed the back end of the timeline materially. I built in a structured review cycle with the Director and the Branch Manager in the final fortnight rather than presenting one finished document at the end (actions).

The report was delivered three days ahead of the formal deadline, with all sections substantively complete on first submission. Our Department-level reviewers fed back that the report read more coherently than the previous year's edition, and the approach has been adopted as the model for the following year (result).