Professional Skills Guide & How to Convert an Assessment Centre into an Offer

[TheWharfConsultant1]

I have interviewed and onboarded quite a few graduates in my career, so wanted to share my experience. To succeed in an assessment center (more on this below), in different interview settings and later in your first job, a number of professional skills/attitudes/mindsets are helpful.

First of all: this is not uni
It might sound obvious, but you are not in uni any more. This is the real world now. Time horizons are much longer, think years or even decades rather than the next paper or exam a week away. Sometimes, a request or a project might be pushed back to next year, e.g. if there is no budget. Your input/work matters more and will have an impact (compared to a paper or an exam). You are now a part of a larger organisation, so you might need to get along with its rules, regulations and customs, even if you might not fully agree occasionally. The success of your organisation depends on a myriad of internal and external factors, some of them outside your control.

Be Yourself
Let your natural personality show. Don’t try to second guess the sort of person you think your counterpart wants. It’s impossible to keep this up over an extended period and your behaviour will appear unconvincing. And you risk being placed in a job for which you are unsuited or which you do not enjoy.

Ask for Feedback
Ask your counterparts for feedback, informal feedback works better and is more frequent than waiting for formal appraisals. This can pinpoint where you might want to improve. However, try to wait for the right moment, e.g. after a meeting or a presentation when your counterpart has a free moment.

Be approachable
Try to have time for your peers and superiors, even if you are busy with something. Chances are that your superiors are even busier/under more pressure than you. It really helps to establish yourself as a helpful, go-to person.

Ask for additional tasks
In the same vein, ask if you can support your colleagues with a task. Don’t ask too much, though. They might not need your help right now, so asking once looks like wanting to help, asking 3-4 might come across as a bit desperate.

Try for yourself before asking for help
If you get stuck with something, try to solve it by yourself first. Google might become your best friend. Then ask your peers for help and only if that does not help ask your manager. It might sound harsh, but see you as a resource to get work done correctly and in the right time.

Keep it Simple
When asked to deliver a presentation or participate in a group discussion, don’t get drawn into too much detail or agonise about the right answer to a problem. Stick to delivering a few key points well.

Listen and Co-operate
Being open to the views of others, demonstrating listening skills through your body language, seeking to build consensus and helping the group focus on the task in hand are more effective ways to show leadership than coming up with lots of ideas or issuing instructions to others. Avoid the temptation to argue with, criticise or interrupt others at all costs. Standing up for your views in a diplomatic way is your aim.

These professional skills /mindsets are important, not only for your professional career, but also for those all-mportant first steps to get hired. Parts of that could be an assessment center (AC) where your professional skills are tested for a day or even more. An AC is a series of structured and timed, exercises which are designed to simulate the kind of activities you would be doing in the job you are interviewing for. As well as a series of stavdard interviews, these could include:

• Company introduction. There might be presentations or talks about the organisation to find out more about what the business does, its mission and values. Listen carefully to this because the information that you obtain here may prove beneficial later.
• Icebreaker. This might be a short presentation about yourself, or a presentation about the person next to you, after you’ve had the chance to connect.

• Aptitude tests. Even if you have already completed these, you may be asked to repeat them. The most common ones used at this stage will be
  numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning and diagrammatic reasoning. If you have prepared for the GMAT https://www.canarywharfian.co.uk/threads/how-to-ace-the-gmat.771/ this should sound familiar.
• In-ray exercise or e-tray exercise. This test evaluates your ability to retain information, establish priorities, reach informed decisions and communicate effectively under time pressure.
• Group exercise. A discussion or activity, often around a case study, which will be based on the kind of work that you would be expected to do in the job you are applying for.
• Presentation. This could be individually or as a group, and the presentation is likely to be short, probably less than 10 minutes long. Sometimes you will be given the subject in advance – if that is the case, the assessors will be looking at your oral communication and planning skills. Another option is that you will be given the presentation shortly before, in which case it is more a test of quick thinking and responding to pressure.

• Interview. You may have one or several interviews, from individual interviews with a senior manager, to panel interviews.
• Scenario/roleplay: you will interact with a counterpart, sometimes even a professional actor in chosen scenario, e.g. the actor is an infuriated customer, a disgruntled member of your team or a supplier who has been let down. Your counterpart will often be briefed to push for a different outcome than you have been briefed on, so the focus is on how well you can negotiate and reach a solution to which all parties will agree.
• Writing exercise. Often you will be asked to summarise key points or review a course of action relating to a professional document (no industry knowledge being required). This is a test of comprehension and communication skills, as well as how well you can identify important parts of a document – again, this sounds familiar to the GMAT
• Breaks. You will yearn for a break after all these tasks, but even then, there might be an (albeit informal) assessment to determine how you interact and use your interpersonal skills in a less formal setting.

The aim of the AC is to be as objective and scientific as possible in evaluating candidates’ potential (at least that is what is advocates claim). This means that:

• You will be assessed by several people over the course of the day, in order to reduce any bias.
• The assessors will be trained to document almost everything you do and say in order to evaluate you against a set framework of competencies
• This translated into almost constant supervision, even during breaks, which can be a bit intimidating at first, but it works best if you stop paying attention to the assessors unless you are in a conversation with them. Going for a short walk outside the venue can help to clear your mind for a couple of minutes

There are also downsides to an AC. They are costly, time consuming and need a good deal of attention by the managers in attendance. Not every job requires leadership qualities and a format focussed on evaluating communication skills might filter out perfectly qualified introverts. But as with the GMAT, an applicant won’t be able to change it.

 

[JFH1]

Good advice. I would also add, once you have joined an organisation, network within it. Most companies, particularly large ones, have their own internal politics - I am not advising that you should get involved in these (that's a personal choice that can backfire), but you should definitely reach out to those around you to ensure that you have a supportive network of people who know you and appreciate you, both horizontally and vertically within the organisation. This doesn't need to be a cynical process - it can actually make working much more enjoyable and may prove invaluable at a later stage in your career.

 

[TheWharfConsultant1]

Good advice. I would also add, once you have joined an organisation, network within it. Most companies, particularly large ones, have their own internal politics - I am not advising that you should get involved in these (that's a personal choice that can backfire), but you should definitely reach out to those around you to ensure that you have a supportive network of people who know you and appreciate you, both horizontally and vertically within the organisation. This doesn't need to be a cynical process - it can actually make working much more enjoyable and may prove invaluable at a later stage in your career.

Fully agree - you can be a helpful go-to person without getting into office politics, especially at the beginning of you career. Once you started your first job, try not to talk badly about people in public. Justified criticism always behind closed doors and backed up by data, i.e. not "X is the most incompetent person I have ever met", but rather "X has got these calculations wrong in the model, so we would have valued the target 20% higher than we actually did - that could have cost the fund a sum of Y. Do you think you could offer them some additional training?"