APS6 is often the level where you're expected to provide specialist advice, manage a program of work, and sometimes supervise a small team — without yet being a formal manager at the EL1 level. Panels are checking that you can operate with real autonomy, exercise sound judgement in genuinely ambiguous situations, and represent the organisation credibly to stakeholders outside your immediate team.
| Typical Criterion | What Panels Are Looking For |
|---|---|
| Supports strategy and change | Evidence you've helped design or implement a change, not just supported one designed by someone else — proposing an improvement counts strongly here. |
| Achieves results | A complex, multi-step piece of work you drove to completion, ideally with genuine ambiguity about the right approach at the start. |
| Supports productive working relationships | Managing a relationship with a difficult or senior stakeholder, or coordinating across multiple teams with different priorities. |
| Communicates with influence | An example of persuading someone to change their view or approach, particularly someone more senior or outside your direct control. |
Criterion: "Supports strategy and change"
My team was using a manual, spreadsheet-based process to track program milestones that had grown unwieldy as the program expanded, causing version-control errors between team members.
I identified the process as a genuine risk to the program's reporting accuracy and wanted to fix it, though it wasn't part of my formal responsibilities to do so.
I researched two existing internal systems the team could repurpose instead of commissioning something new, built a working prototype in one of them using real program data, and presented the option to my manager with a clear cost-benefit case against continuing the spreadsheet approach.
My manager approved the change, I led the transition over three weeks with no disruption to reporting deadlines, and the new system removed the version-control errors entirely while cutting the time spent compiling the monthly report by around a third.
Criterion: "Communicates with influence"
A senior stakeholder in another division wanted a report delivered in a format that didn't align with our team's data standards, which would have meant reworking our systems for a single recurring request.
I needed to push back on the request in a way that maintained the relationship, while still meeting the stakeholder's actual underlying need.
Rather than simply declining, I met with the stakeholder to understand what they actually needed the report for, proposed an alternative format that met that need using our existing standard, and provided a short walkthrough so their team could self-serve the data going forward.
The stakeholder accepted the alternative format, the recurring request stopped needing manual rework on our side, and the stakeholder's team has since asked for the same self-service approach for two other reports.
Use these as a guide for structure and depth — your own response should be built from your own situation, task, action, and result.
APS6 roles frequently request a two-page pitch, or 300–500 words per criterion where responses are separated. Because APS6 sits just below management level, panels are specifically looking for autonomy and judgement in your examples — a response that only shows you followed instructions well, however competently, will usually be marked down against an APS6 benchmark.
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Write My Response — FreeBrowse All ExamplesCommon questions about APS6 selection criteria.