Delivering at Pace Without Sounding Like You Cut Corners
Delivering at Pace rewards prioritisation and quality, not late nights. See the AA/AO and EO descriptors, and a weak vs strong worked example.
Ask most candidates for a Delivering at Pace example and they reach for the same story: a tight deadline, several late nights, and a result delivered against the odds. It feels like the obvious answer, because it is true and it was hard.
It also tends to score badly. A story about working more hours evidences endurance, not judgement, and an assessor reading it has no way to tell whether you organised the work well or simply absorbed the cost of not organising it. Worse, if the story implies quality slipped somewhere or a team burned out to hit the date, it works against you rather than for you.
This post quotes exactly what Delivering at Pace asks for, at Administrative Assistant and Administrative Officer grade and at Executive Officer grade, and works through why a hard-work-and-late-nights answer usually falls short of both, with a matched weak and strong answer against the same prompt.
What Does “Delivering at Pace” Actually Ask You to Demonstrate?
Delivering at Pace asks you to show that you can organise work to hit a deadline while keeping the standard of that work intact, not that you are willing to put in the hours when things get tight. The official definition, published in the Success Profiles: Civil Service behaviours guidance, reads: “Take responsibility for delivering timely and quality results with focus and drive.”
Read that sentence again and notice what sits either side of “and”. Timely results and quality results are both named, not one traded off against the other. A story where you hit the date by letting the quality of the work slip is not evidence of this Behaviour working as intended, whatever the deadline outcome looked like from the outside.
Delivering at Pace is one of nine Civil Service Behaviours, and Behaviours is only one of five Success Profiles elements a vacancy can assess, alongside Strengths, Ability, Experience and Technical skills. Not every advert tests every Behaviour, so check the framework your advert draws on before assuming this is the one you need an example for.
Why Does a Long-Hours Story Undersell You?
Because hours worked are the one part of the story that requires no judgement at all. Almost anyone can decide to stay late, come in at the weekend or push through a tired evening rather than stop. None of that requires you to have prioritised well, communicated clearly or protected the standard of the output, so an assessor scoring the Behaviour has nothing to mark against the descriptors beyond “this person worked hard”, which is not what the Behaviour defines.
A hard-work story can also work actively against you. If the account implies you let something slip to hit the date, or that colleagues absorbed a similar cost alongside you without anyone raising it, the example is quietly showing the opposite of “quality results” in the official definition above. An assessor is entitled to read a late-nights story as evidence of poor planning dressed up as commitment, particularly if nothing in the account explains why the deadline was tight in the first place.
The behaviour the framework is actually trying to see is what you did with the work before the pressure hit its peak: what you chose to prioritise, what you deliberately set aside and why, and how you kept the people relying on the output informed while you did it. Those are decisions. Extra hours are not.
What Does the Framework Expect at AA and AO Grade?
At Administrative Assistant and Administrative Officer grade, the published descriptors for Delivering at Pace ask you to “always work with focus and pace to get the job done on time and to a high standard” and to “use own knowledge and expertise to organise work.” Neither phrase asks how many hours that took.
The same descriptors ask you to “keep focused on delivery and take responsibility for the quality of work produced,” to “keep a consistent level of personal performance,” and to “keep managers and stakeholders updated on how work is progressing.” That last one matters more than it looks. An answer built entirely around solo effort, where nobody else knew how much pressure the work was under until it was already delivered, misses this descriptor even if the deadline was met.
Notice what none of the six descriptors mention: overtime, late nights, or working through a weekend. What they ask for is organisation, a consistent standard, and keeping other people informed as the work moves, which is a different skill from simply enduring pressure.
What Changes at Executive Officer Grade?
At Executive Officer grade, the bar moves from managing your own workload to managing the conditions the work happens under. The EO-level descriptors ask you to “regularly review the success of activities in the team to identify barriers to progress or challenging objectives” and to “identify who and what is required to ensure success, set clear goals and areas of responsibility and continually assess workloads considering individual needs.”
The same level also asks you to have “a positive and focused attitude to achieving outcomes, despite any setbacks,” to “regularly check performance against objectives, making suggestions for improvement or taking corrective action where necessary,” and to “ensure that colleagues are supported where tasks are challenging.” Read together, these descriptors are asking whether you spotted a barrier before it became a crisis, and what you did about it once you had, not whether you were willing to work through the crisis once it arrived.
PublicServicePathway is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the UK Government or Civil Service. Every descriptor quoted in this post comes directly from the published framework, so match it against the grade named in your own advert rather than taking this article’s summary of it on trust.
What Separates a Weak Delivering at Pace Answer From a Strong One?
The two answers below respond to the same illustrative prompt. Both were written for this article to show the difference in practice. Neither is a real candidate’s submission, and neither should be copied.
The prompt
Tell us about a time you delivered something important to a tight deadline.
A weak answer
“We were asked to produce a report for senior management with a very short turnaround, only three days, and the deadline could not move because it was going straight to a director’s office. I made sure we hit it by staying late every evening that week and coming in over the weekend to pull the figures together myself. I did not want to let the team down, so I picked up several tasks that had fallen behind and worked through them one by one until everything was ready. It was exhausting, but we delivered the report on time, and nobody outside my own role really knew how much extra work had gone into it behind the scenes. I am proud that I am someone who will always find a way to get the job done, whatever it takes.”
A strong answer
“A report due to a director’s office moved forward by three working days because of a change in the meeting schedule, and the brief still needed figures from two other teams who had their own deadlines that week. I looked at what the report actually needed against what we already held, and worked out that two of the planned six sections relied on data that would not change the director’s decision, so I flagged to my manager that morning that I intended to cut them and produce a shorter, four-section version, and got that agreed in writing rather than assuming it would be fine. I emailed the two teams the exact fields I needed, named individually, instead of requesting their usual full extract, which took what was normally a two-day turnaround down to the same day for both of them. I set a checkpoint at the end of day one to check what we had against what was still missing, and asked a colleague to check every figure in the final draft against source before it went out, because a document reaching a director under time pressure is exactly the kind that an error survives in unnoticed. I sent my manager a short update at the end of each of the three days, so nothing about the timeline was a surprise on the final morning. The report reached the director’s office ahead of the revised deadline, with the two cut sections noted as available on request.”
Why the strong answer clears the bar and the weak one does not
The weak answer is sympathetic and easy to believe. It is also, on inspection, evidence of hours worked rather than judgement applied. Nothing in it shows “use own knowledge and expertise to organise work” from the AA and AO descriptors, because no organising decision is ever described, only extra effort. The line “nobody outside my own role really knew how much extra work had gone into it” is worse than neutral: it directly contradicts “keep managers and stakeholders updated on how work is progressing,” and it hints that the deadline was met by absorbing pressure quietly rather than managing it visibly.
The strong answer shows a prioritisation decision in the open: two sections cut, the reasoning stated, the change agreed rather than assumed. It shows the EO descriptor “identify who and what is required to ensure success” directly, in asking two teams for named fields instead of their standard extract. It protects the “quality results” half of the official definition through a specific check, a second person verifying figures against source, rather than asserting the work was accurate. And it evidences “keep managers and stakeholders updated” with a concrete daily habit rather than a general claim of good communication. A less organised colleague could have tried to deliver all six sections on time by working the same extra hours the weak answer describes, and very possibly failed, or delivered figures nobody had checked. This answer shows what happened because the writer did not choose that route.
Is It a Problem If the Deadline Was Tight Because of Poor Planning Earlier On?
Only if the answer pretends otherwise. Some tight deadlines are handed to you with no warning. Others are tight because a task started later than it should have, a decision was delayed, or nobody flagged a risk early enough. An answer that glosses over which of these happened, or that implies chaos in the run-up was simply how things worked, can quietly undercut the whole example.
A line like “we were up against it because nobody had started” is honest, and honesty about a constraint you inherited is not a weakness in an example. What weakens the answer is presenting that situation as unremarkable, with no sign you noticed the risk or tried to raise it sooner. The framework’s EO descriptors ask you to “identify barriers to progress” and to act, not merely to react well once a barrier has already become a crisis. If a planning gap caused the pressure, say so plainly, and then show what you did once you saw it, rather than skating past the cause and jumping straight to the recovery.
Where Do You Find a Delivering at Pace Example in Your Own Work?
Look for a moment where you made a visible choice about what to prioritise, not simply a moment you worked hard. A few places this tends to hide in an ordinary week:
- A deadline that moved and forced you to decide what could be cut or shortened, and why
- A request you rewrote or narrowed before sending it on, so someone else’s turnaround got faster
- A point where you checked your own work against source rather than assuming it was right under pressure
- A habit of sending short progress updates so a tight deadline never became a surprise for anyone relying on you
Delivering at Pace and Managing a Quality Service often collide in the same story, because the two are frequently in direct tension: speed can threaten the standard of the output, and an assessor wants to see that you held both. If your example leans more on the standard of the work than the speed itself, Managing a Quality Service When Your Job Is Not Operational works through the neighbouring Behaviour that scores on quality directly.
FAQ
Can I mention that I worked extra hours at all? Yes, but do not let the hours carry the example. If overtime appears, it should sit alongside a decision you made, such as what you prioritised or how you kept quality intact, rather than standing in as the evidence on its own.
Does the example have to end in a fully successful outcome? No. A result that was only partly achieved can still work, provided you can show the decisions you made along the way and what you would do differently if the same pressure arose again.
Can I use the same example for Delivering at Pace and another Behaviour? Sometimes, but be careful. A story that mixes a deadline with a difficult relationship, for instance, might genuinely evidence two Behaviours, though each answer should still be written to what its own prompt is asking, not reused word for word.
What if my deadline was tight because of something outside my control, like a resourcing gap? That is fine to say plainly. Naming a real constraint honestly is stronger than implying the pressure came from nowhere, provided the rest of the answer still shows what you did about it.
Is it a problem if my example is from a small task rather than a high-profile project? No. The descriptors ask about organising work, checking quality and keeping people informed, all of which are visible in ordinary tasks and do not require a high-profile setting to demonstrate.
Turn Your Late-Nights Story Into a Decisions Story
Take the Delivering at Pace example you already have and find the sentence where you describe working harder or longer. Replace it with the decision that sat behind the pressure: what you chose to prioritise, what you deliberately left out, and how you kept the people relying on the work informed while you did it. What is left is closer to what the framework is actually scoring than the hours ever were.