A Story Worksheet Mapped to Competencies

Capture once, reuse often

For each episode, write a short worksheet: a memorable title, the STAR outline in bullet points (not a script), the numbers or facts you can back up, the people involved described by role, what you learned, and which competencies it shows. Then build a grid with stories as rows and competencies as columns. Gaps in the grid show where you need another story; a single story covering every column is a warning that you are relying on it too much. Keep bullets, not paragraphs: memorised scripts sound stiff and break when a question is phrased differently.

Story worksheet

Copy for each story.

Title:         "The flaky payments test"   (short, memorable)
When / where:  2nd year, payments team, 6 engineers
Situation:     - CI red ~daily, people re-running jobs
Task:          - I volunteered to find the root cause
Actions:       - grouped failures by test and time of day
               - found shared test data + clock-dependent logic
               - fixed, added guidance, ran a 15-min team demo
Result:        - re-runs became rare; demo became onboarding material
Facts I can defend: approximate failure rate, number of tests changed
Learning:      - measure before fixing; share fixes so they stick
Competencies:  ownership, problem solving, influence
Possible questions: improved a process / went beyond scope / hard bug

(Fictional example.)

Story-to-competency grid

Spot gaps and over-reliance.

                       Own  Collab Conflict Failure Ambig Lead Pressure
Flaky payments test     X     .      .        .      X     X      .
Schema migration delay  .     X      .        X      .     .      X
Disagreed on caching    .     X      X        .      .     X      .
On-call outage          X     X      .        .      X     .      X
Mentored new hire       .     X      .        .      .     X      .

Gap: no strong story where I was clearly wrong -> find one.

Quick check: Why keep stories as bullet points rather than full scripts?

• Scripts are too short
• Bullets are required by interviewers
• Scripts sound stiff and break when a question is phrased differently
• Bullets let you skip the result