# Behaviors and Competencies: What Employers Rate and How to Show It Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/behaviours-and-competencies/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/behaviours-and-competencies.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving professional behaviors at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Behaviors are what you do; competencies are the clusters employers rate. Learn what indicators mean and how to show both in interviews and reviews. ## Key facts - Title: Behaviors and Competencies: What Employers Rate and How to Show It - Category: Skills Standards and Frameworks - Primary skill: Professional Behaviors - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Working with Your Manager - Primary keyword: behaviours and competencies - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/behaviours-and-competencies/ ## What this page covers - Behaviors are what you do; competencies are the clusters employers rate. Learn what indicators mean and how to show both in interviews and reviews. - Practical guidance for behaviours and competencies - How this topic connects to Professional Behaviors ## Detailed explanation Behaviors are the specific, observable things you do at work: how you listen, decide, follow through and treat people. Competencies are named clusters of those behaviors that an employer links to doing a job well, such as working with others or making effective decisions. Nobody can see a competency directly, so interviewers and managers judge it through your behaviors. When these two words turn up on an [application form](/knowledge/skills-standards/ksa-s/) or an appraisal template, they can read like jargon built to trip you up. They do close to the opposite job: they write down what good looks like. Once you see how the layers fit together, working out what to show and how to show it gets much simpler. ## What is the difference between behaviors and competencies? A behavior is a single action someone else could observe. A competency is the label for a group of related behaviors that, together, go with good performance in a role. "Making effective decisions" is a competency. Checking the facts before you commit, asking for the view of someone who disagrees and explaining your reasoning afterward are behaviors that show it. Many frameworks define a competency more broadly than behavior alone, folding in the knowledge, skills and attitudes a role needs. The assessment still comes back to behavior, because behavior is the only part anyone else can see. So when a job posting lists a competency, the real question behind it is simple: what have you done, in specific situations, that shows this? ## What is a behavioral indicator? Behavioral indicators are the concrete, day-to-day examples a framework gives under each competency to show what it looks like in practice. They turn a broad heading into something you can recognize, practice and give evidence for. A competency such as working with others, for example, breaks down into indicators like listening to others. The New Zealand Intelligence Community's framework shows the typical structure: six competencies, each with indicators that describe what the behavior looks like at work. Many assessments go a step further and pair each competency with positive and negative indicators, meaning behaviors that show the competency being met and behaviors that show it falling short. Assessors use those lists to rate you. They are never complete, but they are the most direct statement you will get of what an organization means by "good." If you can get hold of the framework for a role, read the indicators before you prepare anything else. ## Are competencies the same as skills? Not quite. Technical and specialist skills tend to belong to one kind of job: running a particular analysis, operating a specific system. Competencies apply across a range of roles, which is why the same one can appear in postings for an accountant, a caseworker and a project officer. You will also see "competences" and "competencies" used as if they were the same word, and usually they point at the same thing. Where HR people do separate them, "competences" leans toward outputs and minimum standards of performance, while "competencies" leans toward what a person brings, meaning their behaviors and qualities. Either way, you are judged on what you do, not on a trait you are assumed to have. That matters, because behavior is something you can change. ## What are the Civil Service Behaviours? The UK Civil Service assesses candidates through Success Profiles, which have five elements: Behaviours, Strengths, Ability, Experience and Technical. According to the Success Profile Behaviours guidance published by Defence Equipment & Support, part of the Ministry of Defence, behaviors are the actions and activities that lead to effective performance in a role. Examples include Seeing the Big Picture, Making Effective Decisions, Communicating and Influencing, and Delivering at Pace. Two details make preparation easier. First, the behaviors are specific to the grade of the job, so the same behavior is expected at a wider scope in a more senior role. Second, the job posting states which behaviors that particular role will assess. Prepare evidence for those, at the level the grade implies, rather than trying to cover the full set. ## How do I answer a "tell me about a time when" question? Questions that open with "Tell me about a time when..." are behavior questions, and the [STAR structure](/knowledge/teamwork/teamwork-examples-for-interview/) (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is the standard way to answer them. HMRC's careers guidance advises candidates to explain their personal actions, what they thought about, why they chose those actions and the positive impact those actions had. That advice points at how the answer is scored. The assessor is rating your contribution, so an answer full of "we" leaves them very little to score. Keep the situation and task short, spend most of your time on what you did and why, and finish with a result you can state plainly. Before you choose an example, check it against the indicators for the behavior in question. The best example is the one that shows those indicators most clearly, not the most impressive story you have. ## What if I don't have work experience to use as an example? Your evidence doesn't have to come from paid work. Work experience, volunteering, a hobby, a study project or a part-time job can all show the same behavior. Calming down a frustrated customer at a weekend job is as real an example of handling a tricky conversation as anything that happens in an office. What changes with less experience is the effort of spotting the behavior inside an ordinary-looking memory. Take one experience at a time and ask which indicators it touches: who you worked with, what went wrong, what you decided and what happened next. Most people find that a single group project or student job supplies evidence for several behaviors once they look at it from more than one angle. ## How are behaviors and competencies used in performance reviews? The framework that screened you at the application stage often follows you into the job. Organizations use the same competencies to support performance and development conversations, and some describe each behavior at levels such as below, meeting and exceeding expectations, so your manager can rate where you are. Where those indicators are vague or missing, managers struggle to rate consistently, and you struggle to know where you stand. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described what that uncertainty costs: > I was sent abroad for a four-month project that had been described as something important, challenging, and high-profile. But once I was there, it wasn't always clear what I was actually expected to achieve. > > I kept wondering: What does success look like here? What are they really expecting from me? They would tell me something, but I was never entirely sure whether I had understood it the way they intended. > > Because of that uncertainty, I found myself looking for a lot of reassurance. I wanted some kind of confirmation that what I was doing was at least roughly right, so I asked a great many questions. > > At the same time, I worried that I might simply be wasting people's time by asking so much. I spent far too much energy on that uncertainty, and it became much more emotional than it needed to be. > > Looking back, I think I would have been a much more effective employee if I had had a clearer understanding of what was expected of me, what good performance looked like, and how things were generally done in that environment. The practical fix is to ask early. In your first weeks, [ask your manager](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-align-expectations-with-your-manager/) what meeting each competency looks like in your role, ideally with an example of someone doing it well. It also helps to walk into that conversation knowing your own pattern, and [a baseline of your skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) gives you something concrete to compare against what your manager describes. ## Can you develop behavioral competencies? Yes. Because competencies are expressed through behavior rather than personality, they respond to practice. Choose one indicator you want to show more often, look for a real situation this week where you can try it, then ask someone who saw it how it came across. Repeat until it stops feeling deliberate. You don't need to become a different person to do this. A quieter person can show [strong communication](/knowledge/communication/strong-communication/) through preparation and clear follow-up rather than by talking more in meetings. The behavior is what gets assessed, and there is usually more than one way to produce it. ## What it takes to show the behaviors you have Look back across these answers and the same thing keeps coming up: a behavior only counts once someone else can see it, and it is always judged against a description of good. Doing well under a framework depends less on memorizing competency names than on a handful of habits that make your behavior visible and your evidence honest. **Professional Behaviors** is where many indicators quietly start. Frameworks spell out the everyday conduct that keeps collaboration smooth: treating people with respect whatever their role, staying open to change, looking for the positive and staying clear of passive or negative patterns. Being deliberate about that conduct gives you two things at once, the behavior itself and a stock of situations you can describe when asked for evidence. **Building Self-Awareness** decides which examples you can give with confidence. You can only offer evidence for behaviors you can see in yourself, and knowing your natural strengths tells you which competencies you already show reliably. Asking for specific, future-focused feedback does the rest: it uncovers the indicators you believe you meet but others don't notice, before an interview or review does it for you. **Working with Your Manager** matters because your manager is usually the person rating you against the framework. Agreeing early on what success looks like, making your results visible and preparing for performance reviews with examples tied to the indicators all turn a rating you receive into one you help shape. A regular one-on-one is the natural place to check you are on track. If you'd rather know than guess, the free Job Skills Test lets you see [how these three measure up](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), **alongside the other nine work skills it covers**, so you can pick one to practice next. Each of them is learnable, so a weaker result simply tells you where to start. ## The evidence you already have Parts of this may describe how you already work on a good day. If there is a shift where you showed a new coworker the ropes without being asked, or a group project where you were the one who chased the missing pieces, you already have evidence of a competency, and it belongs to you. The behaviors you don't show yet can be built the same way, one situation at a time, without changing who you are. As your responsibilities grow, more of how you are judged rests on these behaviors and less on what you know, so the earlier you know your strengths and gaps, the smaller each gap is to close. That makes now a good moment for a first look. ## Find out which behaviors to build first That leaves one useful step: getting a clear picture of your own starting point. The **free** Job Skills Test is a self-assessment of your work skills that takes 7 minutes and maps where you stand across all twelve, showing which ones will strengthen the evidence you can give in your next application or review. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Behaviors are what you do; competencies are the clusters employers rate. Learn what indicators mean and how to show both in interviews and reviews. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Professional Behaviors. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Working with Your Manager. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/behaviours-and-competencies/ Preferred summary: "Behaviors are what you do; competencies are the clusters employers rate. Learn what indicators mean and how to show both in interviews and reviews." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.