The written exercises

This can vary depending on the organisation and job, but can often take the format of an intray exercise or a report writing exercise.

In tray exercise

In this case you will have a number of documents and you need to make a judgement on what to do within the time allowed. The scenario is usually that your boss is unavailable, it’s your first day and you need to go through a series of papers in a limited amount of time before a meeting. There is often a connection between documents so you need to first of all read them through quickly. Some of the tasks could be delegated to other people – in this case do give some instructions. Also it can help to give the personal touch, to say thanks and refer to someone by name.

The written exercise

Some organisations may give you a lot of material and a quite short amount of time to grasp the key points and respond to a task. You need to go through this information and quickly make sense of it, then to produce a report. Like in an exam, it is important to read through the instructions carefully. If you are asked to refer to specific criteria, make sure you do. If it asks for a recommendation, do this and justify your choice. Written skills are likely to be assessed so do take care, particularly over layout. The use of paragraphs, headers and sub headings can aid the reader. Often you will notice numerical data in the material available, do make some reference to this, and doing calculations is likely to impress the assessor.