Job Hunting: Assessment Centers

Were you invited to assessment center? Congratulations! You are pretty successful because only the best ones make it to AC. If you want to succeed, you should read this article :-).

Assessment centers vary a lot but they have one thing in common - you will not be assessed for your knowledge but for the way you are able to solve problems and deal with time pressure. If you make it to AC they suppose you posses deep theoretical knowledge of the area you have applied for and therefore they do not assess your knowledge they rather focus on your ability to solve problems. How do they do it? Through several exercises. Here are some, you might be involved in:

• Competency Based Interview - pretty similar to the telephone interview. They ask you about 'a time when you had to solve a problem...'. For more info, please click here.
• Presentation - you receive a lot of information about a company or a problem, you have to analyze it, prepare presentation of the key topics and finally present it and answer questions. You usually don't have much time so it is a lot about time management. IMHO you should not prepare detailed slides, but just bullet points and then present self-confidently. There are usually no right or wrong answers. They also assess the way you can persuade them about your solution.
  
• Group exercises - you and your fellow candidates have to solve a problem together. In this exercises, they assess your interpersonal skills and team-work. Some people think you are supposed to talk as much as possible, but that is not true - try to express your ideas but ask other about their ideas! In my opinion, this is the toughest exercises, especially when you meet wrong people.
• Role play - very similar to presentation, but you 'play a role in a company' and discuss the problem directly with the assessors without presentation. Extremely difficult, but I can provide one hint. If there is a problem to solve, involve yourself = offer help.
  
• Case study - again, very similar to presentation, but you write your notes down and then discuss it with assessors. They usually want you to offer a plan of solution, so tell them what people you would contact, what exactly you would do etc...

These are the main exercises that might be included in AC. How difficult they are is up to the assessors. If they are mean, it is gonna hurt. In the next posts I will write about different AC (npower, 3M, AXA, Ernst & Young, Shell, Toyota, Bentley...).