Inside the Career Assessment: Your ILS Readiness Score and 90-Day Plan — Role Ascent

Most APS employees applying for a promotion have a rough sense of whether they're ready. What they lack is a structured, objective view of which capabilities are strong, which have genuine gaps, and what specifically they should be doing before their next application.

The Career Assessment provides that view. It reads your resume against the APS ILS capability framework, scores your readiness for a target band, maps your capability profile, and produces an actionable 90-day preparation plan — specific enough to follow, not so generic that it's useless.

What Goes In

You paste your resume and select a target APS band. If you're not sure which band to target, you can leave the band selector blank and the assessment will recommend one.

Career assessment input showing resume text area, target band selector, and optional agency field

No job description required — this assessment is about your general readiness for a band, not your fit for a specific role. (For role-specific fit, use the Resume Rewriter against the job description.)

The Readiness Score

The first output is a readiness score: a single integer from 0–100 representing how well your current resume demonstrates the capabilities and scope expected at your target band.

Readiness score display showing 67 out of 100 with a horizontal gauge and a label reading "Minor gaps — targeted effort will close them"

The score bands:

Score	What it means
0–39	Significant gaps — the resume does not yet demonstrate sufficient evidence at the target level
40–59	Moderate gaps — 6–12 months of targeted development recommended before applying
60–74	Minor gaps — specific areas need strengthening; applications viable with preparation
75–89	Strong fit — refinement and polish will improve success rate
90–100	Exceptional fit — the resume clearly demonstrates capability at or above the target band

The score is derived from the capability assessment below — it's the synthesised number, not the starting point.

The Recommended Band

If you left the band selector blank — or even if you specified a target — the assessment recommends the band it judges to be the best fit for your current resume.

This recommendation is accompanied by a rationale: a paragraph explaining what in your resume supports the recommendation and why, if applicable, a lower or higher band is suggested.

Band recommendation panel showing "APS6 recommended" with a two-paragraph rationale explaining the evidence and reasoning

Candidates sometimes discover here that they're applying below their actual level — particularly career-changers from private sector, Defence, or academia who don't realise their experience maps to a higher APS band than they assumed.

The Capability Assessment

The core of the assessment is a structured review of your resume against each of the five ILS capabilities:

Achieves Results
Supports Productive Working Relationships
Exemplifies Personal Drive and Integrity
Communicates with Influence
Displays Personal Drive and Integrity

For each capability, the assessment produces four things:

ILS capability assessment card for "Achieves Results" showing current level, target level, evidence found, gap description, and gap severity

Current level evidenced — the APS band your resume currently demonstrates for this capability. Your resume might show APS6-level achievement but only APS4-level stakeholder engagement, depending on your role history.

Target level required — what the target band requires for this capability.

Evidence found — specific quotes or paraphrases from your resume that the assessment identified as supporting your capability level. These are the sentences that did the work in your resume.

Gap description and severity — a plain-language explanation of what's present, what's missing, and whether the gap is none / minor / moderate / significant.

A typical output for a candidate applying for EL1 might show:

Achieves Results: current EL1 → gap: none
Supports Productive Working Relationships: current APS6 → gap: minor
Exemplifies Personal Drive and Integrity: current APS5 → gap: moderate
Communicates with Influence: current APS6 → gap: minor
Displays Personal Drive and Integrity: current APS5 → gap: moderate

That tells you immediately where to focus your development energy before applying.

The 90-Day Plan

Based on the capability gaps identified, the assessment generates a structured 90-day development plan. It's organised by week, with a focus theme and a set of concrete actions for each period.

90-day plan timeline showing weeks 1–13 with focus themes and expandable action lists for each week

A plan for the candidate above (moderate gaps in Exemplifies Personal Drive and Displays Personal Drive) might look like:

Weeks 1–2 — Audit and baseline

Review your current resume against the EL1 work level standard for each capability
Identify two specific roles or projects from your history where you demonstrated above-APS6 judgment or initiative
Document the full STAR story for each

Weeks 3–6 — Evidence building

Seek out stretch assignments that produce evidence at EL1 scope — specifically opportunities to shape approach or scope, not just execute
Document each stretch activity in your evidence tracker as it happens
Ask your manager for one project where you take full accountability for the methodology, not just the delivery

Weeks 7–10 — Story development and resume rewrite

Build STAR stories for all five ILS capabilities at EL1 scope
Run the Resume Rewriter against two relevant job advertisements to calibrate your language
Identify any capabilities still underrepresented and prioritise those

Weeks 11–13 — Application preparation

Run the Panel Simulator against a target role's selection criteria
Review debrief scores and address identified gaps
Submit first EL1 application

Each action is specific and executable — not "develop your leadership skills" but "take full accountability for the methodology on one project and document the decisions you made."

The Evidence Tracker

Connected to the career assessment is the Evidence Tracker — a simple log where you capture evidence of capability development as it happens.

The 90-day plan tells you what evidence to capture each week. The tracker is where you record it — the project, what you did, what the outcome was, which capability it demonstrates. By the time you're ready to apply, you have a documented evidence bank, not just a memory that something happened.

Re-Running the Assessment

The assessment is designed to be run multiple times. Run it now to get your baseline. Run it again in three months after following the plan and adding new experience to your resume. The readiness score movement tells you whether your development activity is translating into demonstrable capability — or whether you need to adjust your approach.

Who It's For

The Career Assessment is for APS employees who are thinking about promotion and want a structured view of where they are now and what specifically to do before applying. If you've been passed over for EL1 applications and received only generic feedback, the capability breakdown will usually surface what the assessment panels were seeing that the feedback didn't say.

It's also useful for new entrants to the APS who want to understand how the ILS framework applies to their prior experience — particularly those coming from the private sector, Defence, or academia who may not know which capabilities their background maps to.

Run your Career Assessment →