Career Capital challenges students with first ever Mock Assessment Centre
The Career Capital programme kicked off this year with the first ever Mock Assessment Centre pilot practice hosted at the University of East London. It was designed to provide students with an insight as to what they might expect from a real life Assessment Centre. With volunteers from across many of our business partners based in the City and Canary Wharf, and a keen interest shown by our students, the experience served to be an eye opener for all of those involved.
Our students were given a group task to begin with, requiring them to plan out their corporate citizenship day at a leading organisation and present their ideas back to us within the given deadlines. The idea of this was to see how the students work in a team, communicate and think creatively under timed conditions. This was followed by a one to one interview with one of our business volunteers. The students received feedback on their performance upon completion of the various tasks. Having been put under pressure and not knowing what to expect, the students took the challenge head on and impressed the assessors.
When some of the participating students were asked what the most useful aspect of the session was, their responses were:
“The group exercise was brain stimulating. I developed presentation skills and improved my communication skills.”
“The group task was great – I have never done anything like this so I enjoyed the task and received useful feedback.”
“The interview was the most useful as the session helped me to understand the mistakes that I usually make when talking without realising.”
Career Capital aims to develop the employability skills of the students we work with to help them secure graduate level positions and we hope to continue with the running of the Mock Assessment Centre as well as other programmes in future to meet this objective.
If you are a student, there will be lots more opportunities to get involved in Career Capital activities next term and we look forward to hearing from you. To sign up to our student database, create a profile on http://elba.force.com/. For general enquiries about the programme, please emaileducationworks@elba-1.org.uk.
