Lily Zhang, Manager of Graduate Student Professional Development at the MIT Media Lab and a writer for The Muse, recommends a simple and effective formula for structuring your response: present, past, future.
Present: Talk a little bit about what your current role is, the scope of it, and perhaps a big recent accomplishment.
Past: Tell the interviewer how you got there and/or mention previous experience that’s relevant to the job and company you’re applying for.
Future: Segue into what you’re looking to do next and why you’re interested in this gig (and a great fit for it, too).
This isn’t the only way to build your response, of course, and you can tweak it as you see fit. If there’s a particularly potent story about what brought you into this field, for example, you might decide to start with that “past” story and then get into what you’re doing in the present.
Whatever order you pick, make sure you ultimately tie it to the job and company. “A good place to end it is to give a transition of this is why I’m here,” Dea says. You want to be absolutely certain your interviewer is left with the impression that it “makes sense that [you’re] sitting here talking to me about this role.”