Job Hunting: npower assessment center

In the end of February 08 I attended npower assessment center for IT graduate position. Now I would like to share my experience with readers of this blog...

npower assessment center took place in Swindon, where the npower headquarters is. The RWE npower building is new and nice. The day started at 9.00 sharp with short introduction both of the candidates and the assessors. There was the same number of assessors and the candidates (8 of each). The whole day consisted from the following activities:

• Competency based interview - typical CBI with two managers who were asking lots of questions about your experience, why you want to work for npower and why it that role and so on...this one is easy to prepare for.
  
• Group exercise - it was a kind of role play; our task was to read brief description of imaginary organization and each of us represented a department within this organization. Then we had to discuss how the budget will be spent - there were some proposals for each department prepared and in 1 hour we should have come up with an idea how the budget will be divided. Of course, the there were much more proposals to finance than it was able to finance. I have to admit, this was quite difficult and I don't think we cooperated well. I guess that there were too many people, which makes it extremely difficult to cooperate, when you are under press (assessors and time).
  
• Presentation - 1 week before the AC we were sent three topics on which we were supposed to prepare presentation. They were: 1) major university project (I chose this one), 2) how to motivate people in energy industry and 3) what do you see as the pros and cons of a captive supplier relationship (RWE systems vs. Rest of RWE). Since you had enough time to prepare the presentation, it is not difficult, but you really should link the presentation to RWE.

Summary

This was my first assessment center and I think I did ok, but not excellent. There were a lot of other strong candidates (8 of us made this AC the most populated I have been too). The environment was very friendly, even the assessors were helpful and easy going. However it took them more then 3 weeks to make decision and I did not get any feedback, which they promised.