Applying for a role a step above your current one, or wanting your resume to reflect the level you actually work at, is not about bigger words. It is about making the genuine scope of your experience visible, which is often larger than a plain list of duties suggests. All of this is about presenting real experience accurately; a resume that stretches past what you can back up in an interview works against you.
Three ways to look at your own experience
Count the repetitions, not just the years. A year of experience is not a fixed quantity. Someone who ran three projects last year saw more situations and problems than someone who ran one in the same period. When you assess your experience, count what you actually did: projects, cases, briefs, implementations, reporting cycles. A short career with many repetitions of a task has real depth in that task, and the resume can say so in those terms.
Judge work by its effect, not by how sophisticated the fix was. People undersell achievements because the solution was simple. Suppose an analyst automated a manual checking step with a fairly basic script, and that step had been holding up a payment run affecting thousands of clients each fortnight. The technical solution was simple, but the result it enabled is still worth explaining, and the resume should lead with that result.
Describe the complexity of the situation, not just your position in it. Direct reports are one measure of responsibility, and a limited one. A project officer with no reports may be coordinating dozens of contributors, committee members, vendors, stakeholders across agencies, none of whom are obliged to cooperate. That is a different form of responsibility from managing staff, and it is worth describing: how many people, how many parties, how many moving parts.
Making it visible on the page
These map onto the structure from earlier articles.
Totals in the profile. Career-wide figures, total projects, combined budgets, overall caseloads, give the top of the resume a scale no single role shows, where they can be calculated honestly.
Scale in the role overview. The short paragraph under each title is where the numbers of the job live: team size, volumes, budget, coverage.
Effect first in your examples. Lead each example with what changed, then how, without letting the simplicity of the method shrink it.
The full landscape you coordinated. If you had two direct reports but coordinated forty contributors across seven teams, say both. "Coordinated delivery involving 40 contributors across 7 teams, with 2 direct reports" is complete; "managed a team of 2" tells only the smallest part.
Precise wording. Use the most accurate term for what you did, and avoid adding language simply to make the work sound more senior. If you redesigned a process, say redesigned. If you built something that genuinely functions as a method or framework others follow, those words apply; if not, they read as inflation. Connecting your work to the outcomes the department or agency cares about, the service standard, the compliance obligation, the risk, also helps, because seeing those connections is part of higher-level work.
A note on classifications
Higher APS classifications generally expect more independence, broader stakeholder work and more judgement, and scope, complexity, repetitions and effect are the evidence of those things. The specifics of each level are in the work-level standards and the role's own documentation, which is where to check your claims. Read the position description's language about the level and make sure your strongest matching evidence appears early.