Tell Me About a Time When...

“Tell me about a time you solved a difficult problem.”

“Tell me about a time you had to adapt when your original plan was not working.”

“Tell me about a time you led others through a difficult situation.”

Employers ask these questions because qualifications and skills labels tell them only so much. They also want to understand how a person thinks, exercises judgment, responds when circumstances change, and applies what they know.

They want evidence of capability.

A recent Times Higher Education article makes an important case for giving employers richer information about what graduates know and can do. Drawing on the OECD’s work on skills-first labor markets, the article describes how better credentials, shared skills languages, and portable learning records could communicate educational achievement more clearly.

Those developments are valuable. They improve how institutions communicate educational achievement. They also reveal a related opportunity: helping learners understand and communicate the evidence for themselves.

Employers already show us another kind of evidence they value every time they ask, “Tell me about a time when…”

Why Employers Ask for Stories

A well-developed story gives an employer access to more than the outcome of an assessment or the name of a competency. It provides context. It shows what the situation required, how the person interpreted it, what decisions followed, and what happened as a result.

Through the story, an employer can consider how someone brought knowledge and skills into action, revealing judgment and adaptability in a way a competency label cannot.

A story does not prove capability by itself. Its credibility, relevance, complexity, and results still need to be evaluated. But it gives employers richer evidence for understanding how capability was demonstrated in an authentic situation.

That raises a practical question: How well are we preparing learners to build and use that evidence?

The Experience Usually Exists

Most students have experiences that could become meaningful evidence of capability — through coursework, projects, employment, internships, leadership, and service, they routinely encounter real problems, real stakes, and the need to work with others.

The challenge is often understanding what those experiences demonstrate.

Learners may remember what happened without recognizing the capabilities they brought into action. They may describe the assignment rather than their decisions, name a broad skill without supporting it, or report the result without examining what they learned. They may also struggle to see how an experience from one setting could matter in another.

When an interviewer asks, “Tell me about a time when…,” many applicants begin searching their memories for an acceptable example. They are trying to interpret the experience, identify the evidence, organize the story, and explain its relevance while answering the question.

That is more than an interview-preparation problem. It is a learning-practice problem. We explored those often-unseen learning practices more fully in The Invisible Practices That Shape Learning.

Reflection and Transfer Require More Than Recall

Reflection becomes developmentally useful when learners move beyond recounting an event and examine their goals, decisions, actions, assumptions, results, and learning. Research on self-regulated learning similarly describes learners as active participants who plan, monitor, evaluate, and adjust their learning rather than simply receive information or complete activities (Panadero, 2017).

Transfer presents an additional challenge. Learners do not automatically recognize when knowledge or strategies developed in one setting apply somewhere else. They need opportunities to identify relevant features, connect prior learning to new conditions, and adapt what they know rather than reproduce it unchanged (National Research Council, 2012).

Together, this research points toward a practical responsibility for colleges. Providing meaningful experiences matters. Learners also need structured processes that help them interpret those experiences and carry the learning forward. That distinction is also central to Beyond Experiential Learning: Why Higher Education Needs a Metacognitive Model of Learning Practice.

Institutions Describe Graduates. Graduates Must Describe Themselves.

Colleges already use transcripts, credentials, learning outcomes, competency frameworks, and other records to represent what students have completed or demonstrated. Emerging recognition systems may make those institutional descriptions more detailed, portable, and useful.

Learners need something different. Institutions need ways to describe graduates. Graduates need ways to describe themselves. Students need to understand what they did, identify credible evidence from the experience, explain what it demonstrates, and connect that learning to the opportunity in front of them.

These are two different forms of visibility: one gives employers better information about the learner; the other helps the learner understand, articulate, and use evidence of their own capability.

That is the challenge STARR+ was designed to address.

Turning Experience into Evidence Learners Can Use

STARR+ is a structured framework for reflection and transfer. It helps learners examine a meaningful experience, interpret their actions and decisions, identify what the experience demonstrates, reflect on what they learned, and determine how that learning can inform future action.

Traditional STAR structures can help people organize an account around the situation, task, action, and result. STARR+ adds a second R for reflection and a + for transfer, using the story as a foundation for deeper learning. Learners consider what influenced their choices, how their actions affected the result, what they would retain or change, and where the learning may apply next. Transfer is therefore built into the process rather than added after the story is finished.

A learner may use the resulting understanding in a behavioral interview, but its value extends further. The same learning can inform a future course, workplace challenge, leadership responsibility, advising conversation, application, or career transition. STARR+ functions in this way as a capability interpretation and articulation framework for reflection and transfer.

It helps learners move from:

“I participated in this experience.”

to:

“I understand what I did, what it demonstrates, what I learned, and how I can use that learning again.”

Giving Learners the Language to Describe Capability

Interpretation becomes difficult when learners have only broad labels available to describe what they did. Terms such as leadership, communication, collaboration, and problem solving identify important areas of capability, but they do not explain how those capabilities appeared within a particular experience.

Skills in Action™ provides active, behavioral language that helps learners identify and describe what they actually did. It helps them move from a general claim about capability toward a more specific account grounded in their actions, decisions, and contributions.

This does more than improve the wording of a story. It helps the learner recognize the behavior that supports the capability claim, and the resulting evidence becomes more precise, credible, and useful because it remains grounded in the learner’s own experience.

Build the Stories Before They Are Needed

Employers have been signaling the importance of this kind of evidence for decades. Behavioral interviews ask candidates to bring forward authentic examples because capability becomes easier to understand when people can explain how they acted in context.

Colleges can wait until students approach graduation and hope they remember a few good examples. Or they can build that capacity throughout the college experience, well before it's needed.

The second approach gives learners more than a polished interview answer. It gives them evidence they understand, own, and can adapt when a new opportunity arises.

Better credentials can strengthen what institutions communicate about graduates.

STARR+ helps learners communicate for themselves.

Explore STARR+

The Tell My Story with STARR+™ Learning Practice Program gives colleges a practical, shared process for helping learners reflect on meaningful experiences, identify capabilities through active behavioral language, build credible stories, and transfer their learning into future educational, professional, and career settings.

Explore the STARR+ Learning Practice Program and see how your institution can help learners turn experience into evidence they understand and can use.

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References

Instructure. (2026, July 23). The future of graduate employability depends on making skills visible. Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/future-graduate-employability-depends-making-skills-visible 

National Research Council. (2012). Education for life and work: Developing transferable knowledge and skills in the 21st century. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13398 

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2026). A skills-first labour market. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/2e1b85f0-en 

Panadero, E. (2017). A review of self-regulated learning: Six models and four directions for research. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 422. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00422 

Author’s Note

Tell My Story with STARR+™ and Skills in Action™ were developed by B Optimal Consulting to help learners reflect on authentic experiences, recognize and articulate evidence of capability, and carry their learning into new situations. STARR+ is part of B Optimal’s broader work to strengthen the learning practices through which learners interpret, communicate, and transfer what they learn.