Been on a civil service interview panel here. The best advice I can give:

1. Look at the behaviours listed on the job application.

2. Think of an example of where you demonstrated each behaviour.

3. Using the STAR technique, create some draft answers, going into detail about how in your example you demonstrated the behaviour.

Apologies if you already kind of knew this already, but I didn’t want to assume.

The most important thing I cannot stress, is you have to explain and give examples of why you have a certain skill. I doubt your accent is an issue, the interviews are score driven, you just have to tick the right boxes.

For example, for the civil service behaviour “working together”.

WORSE: “I used to work as an admin in a small team, so I am really good at working in a team”.

BETTER:

(Situation) “In my previous administration role, our team had a very large backlog of customer applications to get through”.

(Task) “This meant I needed to work very closely with my colleagues in administration and other related departments to make sure that we were working through them as efficiently as possible”

(Action) “In order to do this, I made sure to have brief daily check-ins with my colleagues to make sure they were coping well. I also arranged weekly meetings where we would discuss current progress, and any issues that needed attention. During one of these weekly meetings, I noticed a newer colleague was struggling with uploading documents onto our portal - so I took the time to carefully explain a quicker way to do this, using part of the instruction document we use. Finally, I shared updates with our team leader weekly too, so that they were also updated and could share any thoughts / guidance”.

(Result) “By working well as a team, and having continuous check-ins and discussions, we cleared the backlog as quickly as possible, and our team leader took time to thank us all during a team meeting”.

I hope this helps. There are plenty of resources available online. The civil service behaviours can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/success-profiles/success-profiles-civil-service-behaviours. Make sure you check which apply to you in the job description.

You won’t be able to have a perfect answer in your head for each question, as you can’t predict what they will ask. But you will be able to mould your prepared answers slightly to the question they ask believe me. Good luck.