Compose and share STAR statements

Ruben Bolling, Tom The Dancing Bug

In job interviews, employers want to hear how candidates have met specific educational or workplace challenges, using the unique and powerful skills they have gained through both education and experience, to achieve positive results.  In other words, employers respond well when candidates can talk about their value in terms of "situation-task-action-result" (STAR) statements.  In this assignment you'll compose STAR statements based on your own accomplishments.

Read this first

• Elizabeth Segran, "Why top tech CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees," Fast Company (August 28, 2014).

Complete these steps

1. Review what a STAR statement is.  A STAR statement is made up of the following parts:

• Situation: Describe a specific situation in which you were called upon to solve a problem.  Provide details such as if you were working with a team, was it assigned or self-initiated, was it for an employer, school project, etc.
• Task: Describe the specific challenge that you needed to accomplish or resolve, and why it was important that you accomplish it. 
• Action: Describe the action you took. Discuss what you specifically did to address the situation.
• Result: Describe the positive results you achieved. Explain how your employer, class, or even you benefited by your actions. If possible, use numbers to quantify your results and show how you impacted the bottom-line, your grade, other people, etc.

Here is an example of a STAR statement:

• Situation: Working a summer part-time job in a small business office.
• Task: Office needed to convert client records from one database to another.
• Action: Accurately entered over 200 records into an Access database.
• Result: Ability to more efficiently track client outcomes.

In STAR statements, you should always try to quantify your results with numbers, action verbs, and proper nouns (e.g. your role/title, name of the place or event). How long was your role? How many goals did you score? How many people were involved? How much money was raised? How many hours a week? How many customers did you assist? How long was your research paper?

2. Write ten STAR statements of your own.  Develop your own STAR statements for each of the following ten skills that employers report seeking most often:

• Ability to work in a team structure
• Ability to make decisions and solve problems
• Ability to plan, organize, and prioritize work
• Ability to verbally communicate with persons inside and outside the organization
• Ability to obtain and process information  
• Ability to analyze quantitative data 
• Technical knowledge related to the job
• Proficiency with computer software programs
• Ability to create and/or edit written reports
• Ability to sell or influence others 

Write these ten STAR statements down in a word-processing file, listing the SITUATION, TASK, ACTION, and RESULT for each.  

3. Turn it in.  Upload your ten completed STAR statements to Canvas (as a Word or PDF file) to get credit for this assignment.  

4. Share with your classmates.  Find your text-based Discussions board, and locate the posting that your TA left for this week -- something like "Share your reflections on your STAR statements below."  Use the "Reply" feature under this posting to describe the STAR statement that you found the most difficult one  to come up with an example for.   Why do you think this was?  What might you do in the future to be able to better answer this STAR statement?  Make sure your posting is at least a paragraph long.

Notes on this assignment

• The "Situation/Task" here doesn't have to be a crisis, or even a problem. A lot of students immediately comb their memories for those negative situations, and when they can't recall one, the resulting STAR statement is sort of flimsy and personally meaningless. Consider any kind of task/goal/objective/situation/job/class that pushed you to act. Think hard, because you probably even have examples of your strengths buried in seemingly unexceptional events.
• We talk about the key skills of "expert thinking" and "complex communication" in this course.  Think about how you might have demonstrated these skills.
• The idea of "challenge-action-result" statements is to come up with mini stories that demonstrate not only that you have learned such skills through your academics, but that you can apply such skills to new situations when called upon to do so.
• These STAR statements are great things to build into your LinkedIn page and your revised resume.
• The advisers at SuccessWorks can offer great feedback on your STAR statements, and advice about how to work them into your resume or discuss them in a job interview.

• Which of the "top ten" skills that employers value did you find it most difficult to write a STAR statement for?  Why do you think that is?  What could you do to build experience in this area, either at UW or outside of UW?
• What kinds of different areas of your life did you draw upon in finding examples for your STAR statements -- past summer jobs?  past classes?  family or community or religious activities?  recreational activities or hobbies?  Your TA may ask for examples and write a range of options on the board; what areas of experience did other students draw upon, which you did not?  Would it be useful to "mine" those areas for STAR experiences?
• Your TA may pair you up to use each other's STAR statements in a "mock interview" situation -- rephrasing the skill as a question, like "Tell me about a time when you showed the skill of X" -- in order to get practice talking about these challenges and connecting them to the strengths you identified in your other assignment. 

Examples

• Decisions and problem solving
  Situation: Working at a blood drive with the Red Cross for my fraternity
  Task:  We had thought we had a room booked for the event; however, upon calling the university for confirmation they had lost our room and we needed to find one.
  Action: Called dozens of places on campus for over 3 hours in order to find a venue that could be used.
  Result:  Ended up hosting a successful blood drive with over 30 donors in Union South.

• Ability to sell or influence others
  Situation: Working part-time job on wait staff at a local upscale restaurant.
  Task: ​Convince hundreds of customers a week to try new food as well as give them good customer service.
  Action: ​Sell the restaurant in the best light possible and give the customers a good restaurant experience.
  Result: ​People come back to the restaurant and spread the word to others to come try it and the restaurant is more successful and gets more business.

Activities for discussion

Here are some of the questions and activities your TA might suggest:

• Which of the "top ten" skills that employers value did you find it most difficult to write a STAR statement for?  Why do you think that is?  What could you do to build experience in this area, either at UW or outside of UW?

• What kinds of different areas of your life did you draw upon in finding examples for your STAR statements -- past summer jobs?  past classes?  family or community or religious activities?  recreational activities or hobbies?  Your TA may ask for examples and write a range of options on the board.  What areas of experience did other students draw upon, which you did not?  Would it be useful to "mine" those areas for STAR experiences?
• Your TA may pair you up to use each other's STAR statements in a "mock interview" situation -- rephrasing each skill as a question, like "Tell me about a time when you showed the skill of X" -- in order to get practice talking about these challenges and connecting them to the strengths you identified in your earlier assignment. Is it easy to come up with something to say (a small story to tell) about each of these STAR statements?  How is talking through your accomplishments in an interview situation different from writing them down as bullet points?  Which do you find easier?
• The language of STAR statements help you connect your experiences and achievements to the needs of a particular job as expressed in their advertisement.  Check this out for yourself: Visit the UW-Madison Student Jobs board at https://studentjobs.wisc.edu and see if you can decode an interesting student job posting in terms of the skills it is asking for.  How would you write STAR statements that would support an application for this job?

To learn more

• Taking Initiative Student Guide chapter 04, "Reflecting on your career story."
• Katharine Brooks, You Majored in What? chapter 04, "Why settle for one career when you can have ten?"
• The STAR Method: The Secret to Acing Your Next Job Interview
• How to Use the STAR Interview Response Method
• Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, "The skills of the new machines" in The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014).  Responds to Levy and Murnane's 2004 arguments about human critical thinking and complex communication being key strengths and skills for the digital workplace.
• Bill Coplin, "Planning your skills agenda," in 10 Things Employers Want You to Learn in College (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2012).  
• Richard Florida, "The creative class," in The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002).  
• Edwin W. Koc, "Getting noticed, getting hired: Candidate attributes that recruiters seek," NACE Journal (2011).  
• Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, "How computers change work and pay," in The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004).  Describes critical thinking and complex communication as key strengths and skills which a college education provides for today's digital workplace.
• Dan Schawbel, "Hard skills: Be more than your job description," in Promote Yourself: The New Rules for Career Success (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2013).