Communication
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
I explain information clearly in writing and in person, and I change the way I communicate to suit the person I am helping.
In 2025 I was a volunteer peer mentor for 25 first-year international students at my university in Melbourne. Many were missing key dates because the official emails were long and hard to follow.
I wanted to make the key information easy to find and easy to understand.
I wrote a short email every Monday in plain English with three parts: what is due this week, where to get help, and one tip. I kept each email under 200 words, put every date on its own line and asked my coordinator to check each draft. Before I sent the first one, I asked three students to read it and tell me what was unclear, and I changed the order of the parts after their comments. I also sent a reminder two days before each major date. For students who preferred to talk, I ran a 20-minute drop-in session each Wednesday. When a student did not understand something, I did not repeat the same words. I used a different example or drew a simple timeline on the whiteboard.
None of my 25 students missed the census date that semester, and 21 of them came to at least one drop-in session. My coordinator asked me to share my email format with the other 11 mentors, and the program used it the next semester.
In this role I would bring the same plain, careful approach to writing to customers and explaining processes over the phone.
268 words. Action is 58 percent of the STAR words.
Why it works: It covers both parts of a two-part criterion (the emails for written, the drop-in sessions for verbal), and the result is a fact an assessor can check: none of 25 missed the date, and the format was adopted.
