Find your Developing Self and Others examples

You almost certainly have Developing Self and Others evidence already — in jobs, volunteering, study or caring. The trick is finding the moments where you learned deliberately or helped someone else grow, then testing them against the grade you want.

Start with four hunting grounds

Do not start by writing. Start by listing. Work through the four places this behaviour hides, and write down every candidate moment, however small. You will choose the best one later.

• Work — feedback from a manager, a process you mastered then taught, a colleague you trained, a course you actually used.
• Volunteering — training you received or gave, new volunteers you buddied, skills you built to fill a gap in the team.
• Education — peer study groups you organised, a subject you failed then fixed, mentoring schemes you joined or ran.
• Caring and community — learning to support a family member, coaching at a club, helping someone build confidence or skills.

Retail, care, hospitality and volunteering examples are exactly as valid as office ones. Assessors score the evidence, not the setting.

Work through six steps

1. List every development moment

   Set a 20-minute timer. Write down every time you learned something deliberately, acted on criticism, or helped someone else improve. Aim for ten or more moments across all four hunting grounds.

2. Mark who developed

   Next to each moment, note whether it was mostly you developing, someone else developing because of you, or both. Moments in the second and third groups are stronger at HEO and above.

3. Check for feedback

   Underline the moments that include real feedback — asked for or not — and a change you made because of it. This behaviour scores self-awareness, so moments with visible feedback beat ones without.

4. Test against the level descriptor

   Read the descriptor for your target grade. Cross out any moment that only fits a lower grade — for SEO, for example, a purely personal learning story will not stretch far enough.

5. Choose the moment with a number

   From what remains, pick the one where you can measure the result: people trained, errors cut, weeks saved, a score improved. Numbers turn a pleasant story into scorable evidence.

6. Write it with STAR

   Draft with Situation, Task, Action, Result. Two sentences of Situation, one of Task, around 60% of your words on Action, and a Result containing your number. Then count the words against the limit in the advert.

Test the example before you commit

A strong example for this behaviour answers yes to four questions. Did you choose to develop, rather than being forced? Did feedback change what you did? Did another person benefit, especially at HEO and above? Can you finish with a number?

For example, shadowing a senior colleague is only evidence if you went with a purpose, captured what you learned and applied it — 'I spent three shifts observing how she ran handovers, then rewrote my own notes and cut missed details to zero.'

If your best moment fails one question, do not bin it immediately. Often the missing piece happened but you forgot it — ask yourself what you adjusted, who you told, and what changed afterwards.

Final checklist

• I listed at least ten candidate moments before choosing
• My chosen example matches the level descriptor for the grade
• Feedback appears, with the specific change it caused
• At HEO or above, someone else's growth drives the story
• The result includes at least one number
• I can tell the story in the word limit with 60% on the Action