Probably the most frequent concern clients express to us when making a judicial or silk application is that they are not very good at blowing their own trumpet. The assumption that competency based processes require you to blow your own trumpet is a misconceived. You are not meant to say how impressive your cross-examination of an expert witness was nor how wonderful your client care skills are.
What the JAC or QCA require when it comes to drafting competency based examples, is that you give a factual description of a situation that is relevant to a particular competency. In essence you are simply giving evidence of:
- A situation / challenge you were faced with;
- How you dealt with it; and
- The outcome.
Your ability is best demonstrated not by you explaining how brilliant you are but by your selection of an example that had a difficult challenge and required you to go the extra mile to solve. If the competency was concerned with your communication ability this might mean selecting an example where you had to explain strictly liability to a LIP with a low IQ as opposed to explaining the same concept to professional client. These are competitions and this means that you should not select everyday pedestrian examples.
Leave it to your assessors (referees) to sing your praises in gushing terms, albeit bear in mind that they are also required to give evidence of your abilities by way of examples.