How to Answer ‘What’s Your Biggest Achievement?’
When interviewers ask you to talk about your biggest achievement, they want to know how you view success as well as what you’re capable of achieving. To stand out against your peers, it’s not always about having the biggest achievement in terms of scale/numbers. Instead, the way you break down your past experiences and relate them to the role you’re interviewing for can create a much more positive impression than you might think.
Always have a few examples ready of some of your greatest achievements before your interviews, along with a list of the most important key points you want to remember. You’ll need to talk about your role in the achievement, the results you achieved (with statistics to add weight to your answers), and anything else about how this impacted your work and what lessons it taught you. You should also create a link between this achievement to the role you’ve applied for, discussing how your transferable skills and knowledge could help you produce similar results.
If you don’t have much experience in the Life Science industry, talking about your personal achievements can still create a strong impression on your interviewers. As an example, if you’ve always struggled with public speaking, your greatest accomplishment may be successfully delivering a pitch or presentation to a large audience. Although this might not feel like a huge deal and therefore not the best example, you could go into detail about how you overcame your struggle, what the results of your presentation were, and how this experience has changed your work.
Don’t be intimidated by this question if you’ve not got a huge scientific breakthrough sitting on your CV. Remember that how you analyse your accomplishments will more often than not mean more than what you achieved in itself. You could have got the highest score possible on an exam or managed a breakthrough clinical trial, but if you can’t talk about your experience and give context to the outcomes, these examples won’t give much away about who you are as a person, which is becoming all the more important to recruiters in 2022.
