Had a wonderful example of "prior experience" slightly backfiring when I did my AIB (Admiralty Interview Board) when getting my Commission from the Ranks. The older Special Duties guys and gals I don't think did a full AIB (IIR) but, if you conned 'em early in your career as I managed to, you had to do the usual AIB along with all the Civvie hopefuls and take your chance. For the Practical Leadership element, all us Matelots were in one team with about 4 or 5 other teams made up of the Civvies. Note, this was back when we actually
had a Navy and so had to recruit quite a few people for each Dartmouth Entry.
As most of us Matelots knew each other, and so had been doing some serious drinking the night before as a "Team Bonding Exercise", we were a bit shabby that morning. However, this simply aided our guile and ingenuity and, while the Civvie groups were falling off planks, dropping barrels into "bottomless" chasms and being eaten by hungry crocodiles and such like, we finished every single exercise and completed them well ahead of time whereas the Civvie groups generally failed miserably (not an issue as the Staff were looking for Leadership potential I guess).
After it was all over, we all got taken to one side and were severely reprimanded by a
very grumpy set of AIB Staff for making it look too easy and, especially, for showing the Civvies up!!!!!! They even accused us of not taking it seriously which, erm, I guess we weren't really! Ooops!
