Find Making Effective Decisions examples in your own history
You make more decisions than you think: settling disputes, choosing between options with imperfect information, fixing problems under time pressure. This guide shows you how to surface those moments and pick the ones that will score.
What counts as a decision example
A usable example has four ingredients: a situation with something at stake, information you gathered or weighed, a genuine choice between at least two options, and an outcome you can describe. Retail, care, hospitality, volunteering, education and caring all produce these moments.
What does not count: following a rota someone else set, implementing a decision made above you, or a problem that had only one possible answer. Assessors score judgement, and judgement needs a real choice.
For example, a care worker who rearranged visit schedules when a colleague left, balancing travel time against each client's needs, has a decision example. A care worker who simply worked harder to cover the same list has a delivering example, not a deciding one.
Work through your history systematically
List your decision points
Go through each role you have held, paid or unpaid, and note every occasion where you chose between options: refunds, scheduling, spending, prioritising, staffing, suppliers. Aim for ten rough notes, not polished stories.
Filter for real stakes
Cross out anything where being wrong would have cost nothing. Keep decisions where money, time, safety, service or someone's trust was genuinely on the line.
Check for evidence and options
For each survivor, ask: what did I check or compare, and what were my options? If you can name two sources of information and two options, the example can show structured reasoning.
Match to the grade
Compare each candidate against the level descriptor for the grade you want. A personal task decision suits AA to EO; a team or service decision suits HEO to SEO; strategic decisions with budgets and boards suit Grade 7 and above.
Pick the freshest and fullest
Choose examples from the last few years where you remember specifics: figures, names of policies, exact options. Vague memory produces vague statements, and vague statements score low.
Draft, then test against the indicators
Write the example up in STAR structure, then check it against the positive indicators in our assessment criteria guide before you commit to it.
Places people forget to look
If paid work gives you nothing at the right level, widen the search. These sources regularly produce strong decision examples.
- Volunteering: committee spending choices, event planning with uncertain numbers, safeguarding calls.
- Education: group projects where you chose a direction against disagreement, or juggling deadlines.
- Caring: arranging care around appointments, choosing between providers, managing a tight household budget.
- Community roles: sports clubs, faith groups, tenants' associations, anything with money or people to organise.
- Acting up or deputising: any period where decisions temporarily sat with you.
- Side projects: selling online, freelancing, or running anything where your choices had consequences.
Tip
The strongest examples often come from constraints: not enough staff, money, time or information. Search your memory for moments when you could not have everything, because that is where real decisions live.
Test each candidate before you commit
Before writing 250 words around an example, run it through this checklist. If it fails more than one line, keep looking.
- The decision was mine, or my recommendation drove it.
- At least two real options existed, and I can name them.
- I gathered or weighed information before choosing.
- Being wrong would have had a visible cost.
- The outcome has at least one number I can state.
- It matches the level descriptor for the grade I am applying for.
Once you have a candidate that passes, the AO example statement and SEO example show how different levels look written up.
Frequently asked questions
Look outside paid work first: volunteering, education, caring and community roles all count, and assessors treat them equally. If you are still stuck, think smaller: a real £60 refund decision told with clear reasoning beats an invented strategic one. Never fabricate, because interviews probe the details.
Within the last three to five years is a sensible guide, because you need to remember specifics: figures, options, policies. Older examples work if you can recall concrete detail, but a faded story produces the vague writing that scores low. Check the advert, as a few departments state a recency rule.
Yes, but rewrite it each time for the grade and word limit, and never reuse it for a different behaviour in the same application. Assessors read for fit, and a recycled statement usually reads like one. Re-pitching an example is normal; pasting it unchanged is the mistake.
Ask what would have happened if you had decided badly. If the honest answer is 'nothing much', the example is below any grade. Trivial examples lack stakes, and without stakes there is no judgement to score. Keep searching until being wrong would genuinely have cost money, time, service or trust.
Next step
Get the free STAR template — the same structure used in every example on this site.
Download the template pack