Module 7: Assessment Centres

some firms will take you straight to interviews after you complete everything online but other firms will tell you first to complete an assessment center otherwise known as an AC an assessment center essentially is a half day or even a full day program or exercise or bunch of exercises where you go into the firm's offices and you spend half a day or a full day with five six seven or even eight other candidates so it's going to be you and other students who have applied for this opportunity in a room for free to 4 hours there

there'll be breaks in between or 5 or 6 hours with breaks in between and lunch and everything sorted out by The Firm where you are being tested on different skills and different uh group exercises so let's go through the different exercises that you can expect at an assessment center the first one is case studies so typically you'll be all given a booklet or a package with lots of information and it's a case study it's going to be a real life previous or madeup case study relevant to the division that you've applied to so if it's

uh Investment Banking it might be something related to an IPO or a merger or an acquisition or it might be a trading exercise or it might be an investing exercise for the asset management business or it might be some project management stuff in operations whatever it is it's going to be a package full of lots of different information they're going to give you an allocated time to read that information and then come back to your team or group and discuss everything you found there's going to be a key objective or a few things that you

need to do or achieve as part of a group using the information that they've given you so you're going to have to solve a problem and then you're going to have to come up with that solution as a group and then you're going to have to present that to people or employees or the assessors at the assessment center key thing here is that the firm is trying to identify how you work as part of a team how you consume lots of information in a short amount of time and if you can find the key information

from that larger information set and draw useful conclusions and solutions if you're addressing the actual problem and you're coming up with a reasonable solution and your presentation skills so they want to see everyone present they're going to see who presents the best who's confident who has room for improvement so on and so forth so that's the group exercise case study next you've got interviews so believe it or not you're going to have and these typically happen towards the end of the assessment center you might have an interview or two with actual employees that way they

batch the assessment center with interviews so you don't need to come in for another interview later on and then typically they'll see who they like from the assessment center which candidate or two stood out and they'll give them an offer or they might give them a final interview other things include you know how you did your online psychometric tests numerical test verbal reasoning and logical reasoning some assessment centers will actually get you to do those again in person and if they see a big discrepancy from your online answers to the ones you do in person

then they might think that you got someone to help you also it's not the end of the world if you don't do well in these because if you do poorly on your numerical reasoning psychometric reasoning logical reasoning tests but then you do really well in the group exercise and really well in the interviews then you might get an offer to the next stage of the interview like it's not the be all and end all they totally understand that you're a student you're learning and this is all new to you and so they don't expect you

to crush every single assessment roleplay exercises so they might ask a client a actor or one of you to act as a client and someone else to act as a employee and see how you can role play and see how you pretend to offer the services of the firm and act out as if you're an actual employee and how you would interact in a real client facing scenario that will be useful if you're applying for a client facing role and so they might do case studies like this where you are expected to roleplay to test

your interpersonal skills for example so there's case studies there's redoing your tests there's interviews there's roleplay exercises there's presentations so earlier I mentioned that as part of case studies you might be expected to present your work similarly they will just test your presentation skills on its own they might ask you to work on something before you come to the assessment center and present that so keep in mind if you go to an assessment center chances are you're going to be expected to do a presentation so it's good to kind of develop those skills now sooner

rather than later