What do you put on a job application if it asks you to detail a decision and how you came to it?

Answer 1

This is a question about your problem-solving skills, your thought process, your ability to analyze a situation, and your priorities or your sense of what's important.

You would want to be able to state a problem that required you to make a decision. For example, how did you handle a decision about your choice of career?

Then think about what information you felt you needed in order to make a sound decision. What knowledge did you consider, what research did you do, what questions did you ask, what testing or experimenting did you have to perform?

After you gathered your information, what was your analysis of the information? What experience, your own or someone else's, did you have to guide you? Did you remember any education or training or teaching that helped you?

At some point you defined two or more options that might work as solutions to your problem. (If there was only one, you weren't making a decision.) Then you had to weigh and evaluate the options. What could you eliminate right away? What priorities did you apply to the rest? How did you arrive at your choice of the best solution?

When you had gathered information, analyzed it, considered your options, and measured them against your priorities, you undoubtedly came to a good, sound decision that was the best-informed and most carefully weighed choice you could make under the circumstances.

The application might not ask you for the last step, but you might want to have it in mind anyway. That step is to think about the result. When you've made the best decision you could under the circumstances, did it turn out all right? With hindsight, did you do the right thing? What did you learn? That becomes part of the experience that you will have to draw upon the next time you face a similar situation.