How to Get a Job in The Civil Service - An Applicants Experience

1. Introduction: Hey everyone. My name is Jack and I'm an analyst working within the civil service. I'm also a YouTuber on the side and today we are going to talk about how to get a job within the civil service over the last couple of years, I've been accumulated knowledge in this area Just because I didn't find that many resources available. So I had to work things out for myself over the last year or so. I've helped hundreds, if not thousands of people get jobs within the civil service. This class is everything that I know consolidate into one results. We're going to talk about the cover letter and the interviewing approach and go into all the detail that you guys need in order to get a job within the civil service. The civil service is a fantastic place to work, but it's not easy to navigate if you are new, I'm super excited that you, I think you're really going to enjoy it. I'm gonna give this class my absolute everything. We're going to get into every single detail that you could possibly imagine. But before I get into the detail, I just wanted to say that I'm not a civil service trainer or anything like that. This is just my experience so that I can help you guys from my perspective as someone who's been an applicant, but as someone who's also been on the other side of the panel with all that said, My aim for this class is to give you all of the information that you need in order to nearly replication, which means you get through to the interview and then an interview you know exactly what to expect. Obviously, I can't promise that you're going to get these jobs. But while I do promise is that after watching this class, you will be a lot better prepared than we were before. 2. Class Project: One of the things that I really, really do believe that we all learn by doing. So, this class is gonna be split into two sections. We're going to start talking about the application stage. This is where you do your cover letter, all your written examples. And then we're gonna move on to the interview stage on Get ready into the behaviors, etc. The one thing that we are gonna do in this class though, is a class project. And now this class project is going to be in the form of a mock interview. Yes, very excited. And we will be doing a mock interview with one strand question, one situational question on one past experience question in my thinking with this is that if you get used to prepare in these answers for the three different types of interview questions, you'll be really, really equipped going into your interviews in the future. In this class, I've included a bunch of resources down below in the description, you will find a file called class project. Within this class project document, you'll see questions for each of the nine behaviors. Now, I'm not going to force you to do certain behaviors. When I ask you the questions, I'm going to allow you to pick. And I think this is really beneficial because a lot of different roles require a lot of different behaviors. So you'll find that some roles, particularly senior grades, may focus on things more such as seeing the bigger picture leadership, whereas applying for more customer facing roles may be that is more managed inequality, service, working in a team, etc. So my thinking is when it comes to the time and I asked you a strength question for instance, you will then pick which behavior you want to do the strength question in full. So when the time comes, I would like you to pause this class and then take out your phone or a camera and record your answers to the question that you ask. I think this is really good for two reasons. One, it forces you to practice out loud and actually practice the things that we're learning in this class. I'm the second one is that because we're doing a video, it forces you to look at yourself and see, right? I might make an eye contact with the camera. Am I saying I'm a little too much? I might speaking really fast. This is really, really good, particularly nowadays because most interviews of B and done virtually. But civil service tend to use Teams or Google Meets depending on which department you go forward. So it's really, really good practice filming yourself on video and talk into a camera. However, if you're not brave enough for that or you don't have a phone or a camera available, I would recommend just writing down your answers because it's really important to practice by doing that is how we learn. And then at the end of this class, you'll have three completed answers that you can use in future applications and future interviews. 3. Civil Service Jobs: Okay, so let's just quickly go into civil service jobs. If you've never been on civil service jobs, this is what it looks like. You can just search via job role. You can search by location. You can even search via organization if you have a specific organization that you want to work out, and you can also search by salary range. Let's say that I'm looking for an analytical job because I am an analyst. I will then search. I will bring up every role across government that is available that is classed as analytical. The good thing about civil service jobs as well is that you can set up these alerts and everybody handy. You get an e-mail every single day, I think, with all of the new jobs that have come out across government departments. And you'll notice as well in the civil service that people do move around a lot. It's almost a culture of you go and work for different government departments to get a feel for the civil service as a whole. There's also a lot of opportunities once you're in the civil service to move laterally and get promoted, etc. Is why I really liked working there. There's always opportunities to develop. If you went to this job, for instance, it's a service designer. You can see all the way down the bulk phase, these behaviors, these are things that the people recruiting think that you need to have in order to fit this role. You can also see that this one's got some technical skills as well. I will talk a little bit about technical skills later on because it doesn't apply to everyone. There are also a bunch of publicly available success profiles documents. So if we look, if we go to Success profiles, gov dot uk, you type that into Google. This page will come up. We've got a bunch of documents outlining the success profiles process. And I think it is this one, the Civil Service behaviors document. And you can see the specific skills required for each grade. So if we look at HBO and SEO equivalent, you can see that it tells you he's needed to demonstrate this behavior at this grade. And then obviously, the further down you go in grades, the more they expect from people who are at those grades. So I would encourage you to have a look through that depending on what grade you're applying for, looking into that specific information and that should give you a feel for what they're expecting from you. In this chapter, I've naturally mentioned behaviors because they were huge part of the success profiles process and interview within the civil service in general. So in the next chapter we're going to get into the behavior is I'm going to talk you through what each of them mean in layman's terms, not in the fancy jargon. I've just couldn't tell you what I think they mean and how I approach things. One thing that I also want to mention regarding civil service jobs is that if you don't currently work in the civil, IS you'll only see jobs advertised, what we call externally. However, if you already work in the civil service and you're looking to move to a different department, you may see jobs that are either advertise across government or you'll see jobs that are advertised internally within your own organization. Unfortunately, though, if you don't work in the civil service and you're watching this class, you will only see jobs that are advertised externally. Sometimes departments will advertise their jobs internally to encourage internal progression and things like that. Sometimes they may go across government first and then they may go externally after all. Sometimes they go externally straightaway. It really does depend on the department at the job. 4. Grades: Another thing that people asked me quite often is grades. Now, I've only ever been in a HCO role on our than an SEO role, but typically it tends to be E0. Hco is like entry-level and then SEO is more middle management. Grade sevens tend to lead the team. Grade sixes tend to lead a group of teams or maybe a division, and then a grade six will report into a divisional director, and then that divisional director reports into a director and then that director has a whole area. It'll have a director of HR, Director of Finance, and then they can sometimes report into directed generals, I think they're called and then they're responsible for multiple business areas. And then obviously you may have a Deputy CEO and then you have a CEO. I can only give you my experience based on SEO and below in this class, if you're applying for grade seven, grade six, take some of the things that I say because I have helped people in the past who've got grade seven jobs, senior civil servants, I'm probably not gonna be able to help you. You're probably not watching this class anyway. 5. Seeing the Bigger Picture: In this chapter, we're going to talk briefly about each of the behaviors on what comes into my mind whenever I see these behaviors mentioned, we're gonna start with seeing the bigger picture. Now, this is the one that I think everyone struggles with because it is quite difficult seeing the bigger picture is all about understanding how the role that you do and how the work that you're doing and the work that goes on in your team contribute to the wider organizational objectives. So how is the work that you do help in your organization to achieve its goals in the past, whenever I've seen this behavior, the first thing that I do is look at the organizational goals. A lot of the time these documents might be available publicly, but if they're not, maybe think about talking to someone who works there, just pick someone's brain. It's important to work out what direction the organization is trying to go in. And then understanding how you-all job and the work that you're gonna be doing fits into that. It's all about working backwards because the first thing people say is, well Jack, my work doesn't fit in. I'm working on this really obscure thing wrong. Everyone's work in the organization will fit in, will contribute to the direction that the old wants to go in. And it's just about working backwards and thinking about it logically, I always give the example of someone who works in recruitment. Without recruitment, we can't recruit the best talent, which means that we can't get people into deliver on the work that we need in order to go in the direction that we want to go. Recruit when it's like this massive thing that we need people, we also need to retain people. We need to attract new people, and that's just one example. So think about how your work fits in and helps your organization to achieve its goals. 6. Leadership: Okay, so leadership is fairly self-explanatory. We always think of team leaders, CEOs, directors, all those important people. What about for people who perhaps don't need a team or don't manage people directly. My advice in this situation would be to think about times where you've led by example that can be getting involved when someone's really struggling with their work. Think about how you get people motivated, maybe when you go into really busy or tough periods of work, even thinking about how you interact with customers to role model leadership on those lead in behaviors. If you don't manage people or you don't lead a team, I'm sure there's times where you lead a piece of work or if you lead a project or maybe you have ownership of a service. Think about those aspects of your past roles, on your current role, I'm sure that will help you when it comes to leadership. One thing that I really like to do with leadership is study the great business leaders of the world. I'm always reading autobiographies. I think that's a great way to understand good leadership because I learn by seeing other people. So that's a really good tip, is also read autobiographies and also reach out to senior leaders that you perhaps could be mentored by all coach Bye. 7. Making Effective Decisions: When it comes to making effective decisions, I always think of times where I have to draw upon multiple pieces of evidence as an analyst, this is part of my role using data to support decisions. But also think about times where maybe you've had to make a really important decision quite quickly with limited information. Think about those sorts of times. What did you do to decipher the truth? Also think about times where maybe you've had multiple forms of the truth. This happens quite a lot in data analysis. You'll have people with one set of figures and another team with a different set of figures. What do you do to try and decipher the true facts? I think the difficulty people have here is that they think maybe because they're not a senior leader making huge decisions all the time, that their experiences aren't as valuable but us completely wrong. We make decisions all the time in our roles and it's just about picking the best examples are bonus tip for this one is think about a time where you made decisions that maybe people didn't agree with and how did you deal with that push-back? I hope some of these ideas get those juices flowing in your mind. 8. Communicating & Influencing: Communicating, influencing. This is probably on every single simple service job advert. I don't really know any roles that don't involve communicating. And even if you come in from the private sector, there's always questions on communicating. It's a very, very important part of any role. So I'm not going to dwell too much on the communicates inside of it. I'm sure you can all think of times where you've used written communication, you've presented, you've given verbal talks with people. But the one thing that people do forget about this behavior is the influence inside that is often the focus in interviews because let's be honest, it's sometimes very difficult to influence others to see our point of view. I think about times where maybe I received push-back on something or maybe I was disagreeing with someone on the right route to take what did I do to try and persuade them to try and influence them to see my point of view, that would be my focus when thinking about communicating and influence in as a behavior. 9. Changing & Improving: Changing and improving is behavior that I really like because I am always trying to make things better and more efficient as an Alice starts a large part of my job looking at better ways that we can use data to do things. But think about times in your past where maybe you've improved the service or maybe you identified in your team a process that was just quite inefficient and you made it better. Another thing is think about your attitude to change because a lot of people are quite reluctant to change the way the world is now with technology UI, the change and innovate, or you essentially get destroyed because the world is moving at such a rapid rate that we need to constantly be improving and constantly looking at ways to make things better, particularly for our customers. Customers have so much choice now that we need to provide the best possible service. And the way we do that is to constantly change and constantly improve. I think this one is super important and if it isn't already, I'm sure it's gonna be asked more and more over the coming years. I would definitely think about your attitude to change. Make sure it's good to make sure that you are promoting the fact that you enjoy change and that you are always looking to improve. 10. Working Together: Working together. Another one that I think the majority of us probably understand that I think it's probably asked on most job adverts nowadays, regardless of whether it's in the civil service, we don't tend to work alone. We're always working with people. The pandemic has had a huge impact on the way that we interact with our teams, team morale. I know it's been quite difficult for people to get engagement and start thinking about those things. Wall of you found that has worked well. Another thing about teamworking that I think people don't think about is not the smoothest of processes. A lot of the time, particularly when we're working with external people, maybe there's contractors, maybe there's different teams, maybe these other government departments. It's not the smoothest thing and the people interviewing you will know that and they'd really like to know how do you deal with that. What is your approach? What have you done in the past, what has worked? These are the type of things that I would be thinking ALL as opposed to the general time where you've led a team, the stereotypical stuff I'm trying to get you to think outside of the box here. Another thing that I think is really important is that not everyone has to be the leader in the team. So think about your role in the team. Maybe all the really organized person or maybe all the motivating person. Think about how you fit in the team. 11. Delivering at Pace: Delivering outpace. This one's very important. Obviously, we all need to remain calm under pressure and being able to deliver. I would think about times where you've maybe had multiple priorities, maybe you had unexpected deadlines. What did you do in these situations? Try and get yourself into that frame of fault. Another point about delivering and paste, I think people don't talk about enough is never that smooth and there's always things to learn from it. So what did you learn from the experience that will help you in the future if you got another unexpected deadline, like, is there something you learned last time? Well, think about all of these things. Just as an aside, it's important to include things like mistakes and things that you've learned because it makes the answer more human. As an interview panel, people are very aware of the fact that things and all smooth all of the time. And by including these things in your answers like the tying, the deadline was unrealistic and you just have to push back. And you learned in the future that I would push back prior. Things like that. Just make the example more real for the interview panel. 12. Managing a Quality Service: Managing a quality service from my perspective, is all about focusing on customer experience. How do we provide the best possible experience for our customers? How do we keep standards really, really high when maybe we're dealing with awkward customers. Think about all of those standards that you put in place so that maybe when you busy you ensure the quality remains high. I would also be thinking about instances where you've gone above and beyond with people. I think that we all do that naturally as part of our roles. But really try and tease out those times where you've gone above while people expected, think about times, maybe way a customer gave you a really, really nice piece of feedback or the manager commanded you on something. All of these are really, really nice examples to have in your back pocket. But yeah, manager inequality service is all about how do we maintain the best possible standard of service and focus on the customer experience? The other thing about monogenic quality service is what procedures are in place to ensure quality. I know in analytical work, for instance, we do something called Qe, which is quality assurance. Which means that if I do a piece of analysis, I will get a colleague to check my piece of analysis. You can apply this to anything. I'm sure that you have examples like this in your roles. So also think about those types of situations. 13. Developing Self & Others: Finally, things to think about for developing yourself and others. This is really your chance to shine. Tell people what do you do outside of work? Are you reading books? Are you attending courses within work? Are you asking for development opportunities? This is really your time to lay down thick, like tell people exactly all of the things you're doing to try and get better and develop. Always regards to developing others, if you don't manage people, then maybe talk about times where you've shared a piece of learning. Maybe you do show and towels with people and you talked about, well, I learned this, I went on this training course and I feel like we could do this as a t. Actually you can, you show me how that works. It's all about knowledge exchange, isn't it? And if you are managing people like I manage people in the past, how do you ensure that these people are constantly developing? How do you give these people feedback in a constructive way? Because that's a skill in itself, as you can probably tell, I'm really passionate about this one because I'm always developing outside of work. I get a huge buzz from helping others develop. Hence me during this class for you guys on Skillshare, if you are enjoying it, I would really appreciate it. If you could leave a review and a star rating down below, that would really help me out. Thank you very much. So those are my thoughts on behaviors and my idea was to get those juices flowing. Things to think about whenever you're answering the application questions. Or maybe when you go into an, There's a bunch of stuff to cover in this next couple of chapters. So I would recommend get a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, come back and let's get into the application stage. 14. Cover Letter - Option 1: Generally most applications in the civil service will require a CV and then one of two options. The first one is what we're going to start with and talk about. And that is a 500 to a thousand words personal statement covering why you think you are suitable for the role. Now, over the last couple of years, I have read many of these personal statements because I'm also seen as the go-to person amongst my friends and colleagues. And I've definitely noticed a few things that people tend to do wrong. So what I'm gonna share with you is my personal framework for dealing with this type of personal statement. I'm going to show you how I would do this with an essential criteria that I've made up based on a job that I was in a few years ago. I'm not going to talk about the CV aspect of this application because it would make this class far too long. There were loads of good resources out there on how to structure your CV. On the one tip that I would have for you is don't worry too much about the formatting because when it comes to civil service jobs, this is pasted into the box. The one thing that you do need to do is ensure that you remove any thing that could identify you personally. This is because the Civil Service use something called name blind recruitment. What that means is that there should be nothing that can personally identify you in your CV because this may introduce any bias like someone may know you if they recruit a new, and this makes the process much more fair as a whole. Okay, so let's go into my computer and I'm going to talk you through how I approach these cover letters. 15. Cover Letter - Option 1 Continued: Okay, so step one is to go into the job advert of the job that you're looking at and identify the essential criteria. This will usually be down on the bottom of the page, and it essentially identifies everything that you need in order to be competent in this role. I wouldn't worry too much if you don't hit everything on the essential criteria, but make sure that you hit the majority of it. I guess it's one of those topics, isn't it like, should you apply for a job if you don't hit everything? I personally think you should because there is no candidates who hit every single criteria. And my argument would be if you hit every single criteria, then maybe all overqualified for the job anyway. But once you've identified this criteria, I paste it into a document like I've done here. As I said previously, this is a job that I was in a few years ago and I've just meant to the fall of what the jaw bamboo would've looked like. I did this because I didn't want to copy and paste someone's job advert from civil service jobs. That's not very fair, is it? So step one, identify the essential criteria, paste it into a Word document. Step to moving on is stop thinking about little examples for each of these points. Think about how you can demonstrate all of these points. Now, I don't want you to start. I don't want you to do really detailed examples. I'm just looking for you to write down things literally examples from your current role or previous roles that hit each of these criteria and put it in bullet points below this. For instance, if I was looking for this, an understanding of how HR measures link to the overall health of the organization. I may write something like completed the analysis of the annual staff survey. That is an example that I've got in my head of what I used to do analysis of the survey every year. And that is a good example of understanding how these measures link to the overall health of the organization. A good point here is that you'll think of projects that will hit multiple criteria. So for instance, this completely the analysis could also feature hue. It could also feature in analyzing complex data. So don't be surprised if you find that you duplicate in projects or pieces of work, that's absolutely fine because it means that you can demonstrate multiple points of the essential criteria in one example. Generally at this stage the ideas are very, very rough. So for instance, if I was going to talk about strong written and communication skills, I would do something like learning and development project. Just a little note for analysis. Analyzing complex data, the excellent team working skills. It will just be thinking about times that I've done all of these things. I'm going to go away, write down some of these points and then I'll come back and show you what I came up with. Okay, Step three, I've written down all of these points. Now you can see that I've got annual staff survey analysis. This has come up a few times under a curiosity to see the bigger picture Lincoln data. I've got building management information for a new organization wide strategy under influencing presentation facilitation skills. There was a time where I did a review which required a lot of influencing. I learned facilitation skills from shadowing and event. Annual staff survey analysis also comes up under there. I worked on my written skills while I did a gender pay gap purport demonstrable link to strategic goals. There was a board level KPI project that I was involved with. So you can see that I've just bought a pointed like multiple different things under each of these points, you probably won't even include all of these, but this is just the rough stage just to get ideas out there. It's important as well that I'm thinking back now where I applied for this job. I've only had two culprit type career roles. If you are someone who's maybe new to the world of work, is fine that you're not going to have many examples. If you are someone who's quite established in their career, maybe you've been working for a large amount of time. You're gonna have a plethora of things to pick from. I would just pick the best examples that you can. So now I'm gonna look at this. I'm trying to pick the best examples that I want to highlight in my cover letter. So finally step four. This is the file path under the very difficult part, I didn't do this live because this class would have been hours. This is a very difficult part of doing it and it does take time. But just pick the best examples that you can. Just give more details about all of them. I'm not gonna go through the entire 1000 words here because we'll be here all day. But I think you'll get the idea from this example. And obviously I've got to include all of these assets down in the description below. You can see here I talk about the staff survey analysis. I've got, I enjoy you're applying my experience in statistics were impossible and believe that I've been pivotal in developing our methods to maximize insights. For example, the staff survey is our biggest project as a team. So I've mentioned teamwork in this year. I lead on all statistical analysis, leading a team of three analysts and a methodologist to deliver on outputs. Already there, I picked up on leadership, working with a team and technical statistical jargon which may or may not apply for you as well. One of the themes was, and I've redacted the theme because I obviously can't say the theme. And I decided that we would use logistic regression to predict the likelihood of someone being an effective. I then summarize the results are presented as summary of findings to stake holders in the culture team. So they, I've touched on the communicating part and the summarizing is also a good example of written work. The impact of the analysis was taken to the board results in a deeper dive. This will allow the organization to reduce this effect going forward and adjust our corporate actions accordingly. Not a very good example of seeing the bigger picture. It's going to allow the organization to reduce this effect going forward. And they're going to adjust the corporate actions which they did. It is worth noting that this is quite a long one. If you have five hundred and four hundred and five hundred words, you're not gonna be able to do this much detail. So in those instances, I would just try and give brief examples. However, generally my approach to the cover letter is I tend to start with some examples that I feel the seated from my current role because that's the thing that's fractious in my mind. And then I move on to drawing from previous roles if needed. I guess the only time this is different is if you are completely switching careers. If you just need to draw from experiences that you think are relevant to the role you're applying for. Some tips from reading a bunch of these cover letters. Don't waste words, so don't use empty sentences like I would really like this opportunity because I'm enthusiastic, don't bother with that. It's just a waste of 40 or 50 words. I know that might sound harsh, but when you're restricted by word count, it's really important that you are direct and clear in the language that you use it. You need to tell people why and how you are suited to the job. And by using empty sentences like that, you're not telling them anything that they don't already know. They already know that you're enthusiastic and want the opportunity because you're applying for the job. This is why I prefer my method in through the essential criteria and highlighted examples that I have in the past, I think demonstrate those points. Okay, so that is how I would approach the 500 to a 1000 words on tell me why you all suitable for the roll cover. Later in the next chapter of the class, we are going to talk about star examples. This is when you get two or three examples of 250 words on it, tell us about a time or give us an example of a time when I'll see you in the next chapter. 16. Cover Letter - Option 2: Moving on to the second type of application stage. And that is usually when you're asked to give two or 3250 word examples. Now, these examples will relate to the behaviors on the job advert and they usually test in past evidence. So it's usually tell us about a time when you've done this or give us an example of a time when you've done that. Now, this is where it's recommended that you use the star framework and we're going to use a star framework, but we're going to put a little twist on it. We're going to include a few extra things that really, really help your application. For those of you who don't know what the star framework is. It's situation, task, action, and the result, as you'll see there, I also recommend including a few other things. And even though 250 words is not alive words, it's definitely possible. And I'm gonna show you how we're going to head into my computer and I'm gonna show you the framework that I use for answering these questions. I'm gonna walk you through an example that I've done for managing a quality service. This is the framework that I tend to use when I'm thinking of the examples. And it really, really helps identifying the key bits of information that you need to take out from your example. As I said, we're looking at a time when I've demonstrated good customer service. This is an example that I did a few years ago based on a CIO role, our service was answering requests for analysis from different business areas. The head of a loon Academy came to me wondering if the lunar and Alpha was inclusive for all diversity characteristics. Last two sentences which sets out the situation beautifully. And one thing that I have seen people doing correctly spend far too much time setting the scene, giving context. I know why people do it is because they want to really put through sifted the person reading the application in their minds. But you need to just give them as much information as they need. You need to avoid waffle. In this instance, the task involved analyzing learned in data to compare the demographics of the organization, the demographics of those attended learning courses, simple action. This is why I actually did in terms of analysis, I did email matron, there was a 90% success rate with diversity data. I put the learning data into Tableau, which is analytical software presented in clear fashion using stack bar visuals, which tells you all you need to know. That's technical, but it's technical enough. I don't need to say all of the things I did to get to that stage. I haven't gone off Wood's initial brief, didn't ask for dashboards, but I really wanted the customer to be able to see the data and explain it herself. I'm showing how I went the extra mile for the customer in my actions. It was evident that balloon and offer, it was indeed inclusive and the Head of Learning was thrilled with my analysis as I had gone above, beyond, I really, really like this framework because it's easy to dissect your answer into star. You should think about some other things you do in your examples, ideas to think about and try and include in your answer. What did you learn from this experience? I've said that standardized datasets are very important. Analyst should be brought into conversations earlier. One based on a series of thinking about data collection, a lot of time was spent on plants and the e-mail addresses. I've reflected on this. I'm yes, in hindsight, I think it would have been an easier task and better for the customer if I was involved in the data collection stage, what would you do differently next time, if anything, in this instance, I wouldn't do anything differently. That's not always the case though. Sometimes there are definitely things that you should learn. So keep that in the back of your mind. I was honest, I had a bit more time than usual allowing me to exceed expectations by providing the customer with more than they needed. So now we've done all of that. We've put everything into our framework. We follow about what we might do differently. We follow about what we might learn. You can see that my final answer becomes this, that stage. Then it's all about just connecting the points together. So I'll leave you read this. I've included this document down below in the description and you can see that it ended up being 215 out of a full 250 words. Which means that if I want to add more details, I could some general tips for doing these don't use things like we say, I take ownership of the things that you did, as I said earlier, don't spend too much time setting the scene. You haven't gotten enough words highlight the impact, particularly if it made a big impact, it's really important to highlight that aspect of it. And if you can include a lessons learned element at the end of your example. 17. Technical Applications: If you are not an analyst or going for any sort of technical role, please move on to the next lesson. But if you are stick around because I'm gonna give you some knowledge about how to answer technical questions on the application stage. If you're applying for any kind of analytical role, generally you'll be asked some technical questions, sometimes on the application stage, but usually often at the interview stage. Now for these questions, I would recommend Hughes where you give the detail like sometimes in the application stage, I tell people to be a bit less detail because you don't have as many words. But with these technical questions, I would really give as much detail as you can provide in the word count allows it generally from my experience, a lot of the focus here is on the data quality, quality assurance, joining datasets together and understanding your approach to that as well as data visualization. How you think about dashboards, how you think about charts, What best practices Do you follow and then communicate in data? Because that's a massive role and a massive part of being an analyst. Where, how do you communicate with non-technical people? What's your approach there? So these are some of the things that I would be thinking about here. If you go in for GSS or goals, you need to particularly for GSS, you need to think about things like statistical testing assumptions, how to use social media to communicate research makes sure that you let the person know who's reading your application, that you are technical and you know your stuff. 18. Hiring Manager: Okay, we are done with the application stage, but now I just wanted to give a quick bonus tip before moving on to the interview section, even before you apply for a job, I always recommend to people to reach out to the hiring manager on all civil service job adverts still always be a point of contact at the bottom. And generally this will be the person who's recruiting for the post. So this means that they might be your future manager. So what I always do is reach out to this person and just ask if I could have 1015 minutes of your time just to chat about what they expect the day to day of the role to look like because I don't know about you, but job applications take a lot of time and I don't want to waste my time applying for something that I don't think I'll enjoy or maybe I don't think he's the right fit for me. This is just one of those things that I've always thought is common sense, but it amazes me how few people actually do it. So, yeah, find the email address, reach out to that person and ask if you can have a conversation with them. 19. The Sift: Okay everyone, I have just made myself a, another cup of coffee and now we're gonna move on to the interview section of my class. Now that you've applied for your role, your role will go through something called a set. It's now a sift is essentially when you have a team of people, all of which who will usually be interviewing you. And they all separately read the applications and assign a score for is a pass and then a 56 are both strong passes. On the way it works is that if you are recruiting for your team, you need to ask someone external TR team to help you recruit. Now, they will mark these applications individually and then you'll come together. And the idea here is to arrive on an average score for the candidate. So some people on the team who is sifting may have a tendency to give people quite high marks. Some people may go lower and be a bit harsher. The idea is that you average out and end up with one school for a candidate. This is also where the candidates feedback will be created. One pro tip for you, if you don't get an interview and you see your application, they will be feedback on the application. So go into civil service jobs, have a look through your feedback and it's often invaluable to see what you need to do in order to progress and get an interview next time. Okay, so we're going to assume that you've gotten into view and we're going to practice now some of the interview questions from my experiences, they are a variety of different things that can happen on interview day. So you can be asked to do a presentation which they can ask you to do on the day or you can prepare it in advance. They can ask you to do a technical exercise. You can also be asked to do a judgement tests before the interview. There's so many different things, but in this class we are going to focus on behavior questions. So now that we've covered sifting, we're gonna talk about all of these interview questions in the next chapter. 20. Interviews Introduction: Okay, So as I said previously, they are three types of behavior, interview type questions and what our strength questions? Well, strength questions are quite simple, but they're also quite complicated in the sense that they deliberately vague. There are questions which are asked deliberately in a vague manner to judge whether the thing that they're asking is a strength of yours. It's also used to gauge all enthusiasm. So if they ask you, are you a good communicator, your enthusiasm drops, then this is a good indicator to the panel that maybe you're not passionate about communicating. Another one, he is teamwork. If they say, Do you like working with the team, they say, oh well, yes, Pretty good. And your enthusiasm is quite low. And it's quite easy to tell on the interview panel that maybe this role isn't for you. So take that into consideration as well. Your enthusiasm for questions is also a factor. In order to pass strength questions, you need a three on the marked out for the future facing questions are the situational questions, and these are designed to test what would you do in a given situation. And I struggled with these for a long time before I discovered some of the tips that I'm gonna share with you later on in the class. The thing that people do wrong and I used to do this ready wrong is that you'll be asked to situation and people will still give an example is not the point of the question. The point of the question is to get into IL-4 process. And then the final style of question is a question that I think we're all pretty familiar with. It's the classic past evidence selling via a time when could you give me an example of a time when you did this type question? This is where it's recommended that we use the star technique like we used earlier in the application stage pro tip here as well. You can use the same examples that you use in our application in the interview. Now that I've introduced all of these different types of questions, we're going to go specific and deep dive on each of them, starting with strength questions in the next chapter. 21. Strength Questions Part 1: I've seen a lot of people struggle with trend questions and I've always quite enjoyed them because they are quite chatty. I do enjoy a chat. So the mistake I've seen people make is that they don't talk enough and they often get themselves stuck because they just stopped talking and then say, Yeah, that's it. That's not what you want to do. My advice for strength questions is to use it as a conversation and use it to talk through your CV. You want to talk for about three minutes, I'm pretty sure their time, so you might be cut off. And the other thing about strength questions is that you won't be probed at all. So the panel won't ask you questions. They will just purely mark you on the three minutes that you give them. Okay, so I'm gonna give you an example of what I might say. I haven't prepared for this much at all. I full of a few things that I talked about, but I'm gonna try and do it off the cuff just so you can critique my answer and we can talk about what I would do to improve what I did while etc. 22. Strength Questions Part 2: The question I'm going to answer is communicate and influence in Do you consider yourself a good communicator? Quite a vague question. So let's see how I get on. I'm going to go to Google and look for a timer. I'm going to do three minutes. It's not the end of the world if you don't speak for three, but you want to try and speak for 2.53 minutes. If you go over three, that's when it becomes an issue because you might be cut off by the PyMOL. Okay. So three-star and in 321, let's go. Yes, I would definitely consider myself a good communicator as a data analyst, actually, a large part of my job is communicating with people. So we receive regular requests from stakeholders as well as my larger pieces of project work. What I'm dealing with data requests is really, really important to try and flesh out what the customer is actually looking for. And this often happens in the form of an e-mail exchange or maybe a one-to-one meeting just to establish their needs. A lot of people when it comes to analytics, don't quite know what thereafter. And I often find that having a conversation with them really helps to flesh out their ideas and things that they're interested in, particularly as well with project work, communication is so, so important, whether it's updating stakeholders or trying to meet with people who can help you further along. Communication. It is so, so important I'm not comes down to verbal, written, presentation skills, variables, skills. I've really, really worked hard to try and develop these over the US, not only inside of work but outside of work. So sorry, I've worked. I have a YouTube channel and that's really improved my public speaking a lot. And I've definitely noticed the carryover in work. I have a lot of meat in sometimes with quite senior stakeholders. I've been really commanded in the past on my ability to summarize things ready while and talk to people, given them enough detail but not enough so that they feel overwhelmed. In a previous role before I joined this organization, I spent a lot of time in board meetings and go into various boards. So this really, really improved by paper writing skills. I got good at writing executive summaries for busy directors and distilling all of this information into one package for them. That was really, really good. Enroll before that, I remember we used to do regular show and towels as well. And I was really commended on my ability to share information with people, which is another thing that I'm quite passionate about, helping people. Commended on a presentation I gave about statistical analysis and how people can use statistics in the day to day data. And it doesn't have to be this intimidating thing. Communicated that with slides. And I've been on a food training courses on how to structure slides and how to display information so that people take it in, not just bombarding them with tax, but giving them engage in ideas, getting audience participation, all of those things. So I've definitely worked hard on my communication skills over the last three to four years. And I definitely think that I have both sides of that as an analyst is something that I pride myself on. It's something that I think is so, so important to have on one thing that people don't give enough attention to. I think people think that it's just about the data. If you can't communicate the data, then whilst the point isn't it? 23. Strength Questions Part 3: The time has gone off. That was three minutes. How did you think? I did? I think it was okay. I think it wasn't a bad attempt at all for not much preparation. I'm quite happy with that. In hindsight, the things I did well was I walk through my CV. So I talked about my current role and then previous roles I liked how I talked about different aspects of communication. That's one piece of advice I would give to you is break, breakdown perspectives talk about different aspects because it gives you other things to talk about as well. If I was just talking about verbal communication, then I would maybe struggled to talk for three minutes, but because I was like, Oh, well, communication means verbal, that means presentations. It means written. That gave me a lot of things to talk about. So yeah, I think overall that was a pretty good attempt for being off the cuff. Let me know if you agree, maybe you think it was terrible, but I think that was pretty good. I hope that that gives you an idea of how you can think about the strength questions while we're all not fault. Now it is your two and everyone. So this is the first part of the mock interview. This is your time to do the strength question. What I would like you to do is go into your class project document, and pick a behavior that you think you need to improve on and answer the strength question, I really, really encourage you to film yourself doing this because you'll learn a lot about your mannerisms. You'll learn a lot about whether you say, I'm more, what do you don't look at the camera as much. Recall yourselves. Let me know Donald comments below. If you do record it, you could even share it down below. You could even get some feedback on it down below if you brave enough, I'd be very impressed and I will definitely give you feedback down below in the comments of the project, go away, pick the behavior that you want to answer, answer the strength question that I've given you and then come back and we're gonna talk about situational questions. 24. Situational Questions Part 1: Moving on from strength questions now we're going to talk about the situational questions, all the future facing questions as some people like to call them. Just a quick reminder as well. When this class finishes down below in the description, I've included a question by full of practice questions for you. There's more than enough. There's plenty if you'd get started having sat on a few interview panels. Now, the number one mistake that people make with the situational question is given an example. I know why people do this just because it's more comfortable than actually going with this situation and answering it that way. But we're not looking for an example. We'll look in to see your thought process and how you react in certain situations. We're not expecting you to have it completely figured out. My approach to these questions has changed a little bit because I used to really struggle with these and I always used to give an example. I had feedback from someone that you need to just answer the situation. You need to answer the question, not give the example. Step one for me with situational questions is to get myself mentally into that place. You will likely be asked a situation similar to one that you've been in before. Now my first step is to think, what have I been in a situation like this before? And then I mentally try and put myself in that situation. All of this is very easy. When you've got an interview panel looking at you, I appreciate that, but it does come with practice over time. The key is to just stay calm. And if you need the question right again, because sometimes they can be quite Wudi. Don't be afraid to ask the interview panel to reread it to you. I asked myself what was I thinking when I was in this situation previously, I put myself into that frame of mind. For instance, when was I given like a really tight deadline? What was my first thought in that situation? Put yourself mentally. They start to is the re-frame. Now a colleague of mine a few years ago told me this and it was an absolute game changer. If you see it completely saved me with this question. He said, the thing to do is acknowledge the example in the past by saying, yeah, I've actually had a situation similar to this in the past. And what I've found helpful walls to do this. And as soon as he told me this, I was like, Yeah, that that is the thing. It's acknowledging the example. I've had this situation in the past, but I'm not gonna talk about that situation. I'm going to say what I did in that situation. So use this as a re-frame. Yes, I've had this situation in the past and what I found helpful was this step three is then to talk through your thought process. Talk to them out loud. Explain why you're doing things. Explain your rationale behind something. For example, if you're given an urgent deadline, the first thing that I would do now based on other situations, is to actually check whether this deadline is actually feasible. I've had situations similar in the past where I've been given an urgent deadline. I've realized that. Do you know what this piece of wood it actually isn't achievable in this time. And it's more beneficial for me to go back to the customer and say, I'm really sorry, but this isn't gonna be possible. It's going to take a few more days that's more beneficial. Then really try and to really force it and get it done while I know it's not possible, don't be afraid to share anecdotal evidence like that because it shows that you have experience in this and it shows that why you make into certain decisions. I think that's really key is explain why. Another thing that I like to do is give auctions in delivering at pace scenario, if someone comes to me with an urgent deadline, can we do it? Well, if we can, I'm gonna do this. If we come down, I'm gonna do that. I'm always thinking two steps ahead almost. I'm trying to show the interview panel that no, I'm showing real consideration to these. I'm giving options. If this happens, then maybe I'll do that. If this happens, then maybe I'll do that. I'll do that because in the past I've found that this happens when you do that you say, Well, I mean it shows interview panel that you're given real consideration to what you do in those are my steps. Step one is I take a deep breath and I put myself in that situation mentally. Second step is I re-frame it, say, Yeah, I've had a similar situation like this in the past and this is why I found helpful step three is I've just talked through that process, I think out loud. 25. Situational Questions Part 2: Okay, so let's do an example together and then it's time for your second question of the mock interview and the class project. So here's the question. Your manager has come to you with a deadline that needs to be finished urgently. You have other projects where stakeholders are waiting for you to finish your current work. How would you deal with this? So this is a delivered at pace conflict in deadline classic example. So here's my thought process for this. I've been in situations like this in the past and the first thing that came to mind is, is this deadline achievable? What sort of quality are they expecting? Sometimes with a tight deadline, it really needs to be made known that quality might not be high. They may not be anyone around to provide quality assurance. So that needs to be made clear upfront. Another thing with this situation, and these are blue and cadmium provide an upfront piece of analysis. And then maybe in the future we can do some more in-depth work. We satisfy the customers short-term needs, and then we work on a larger piece of work further down the line that can also work very, very well. The other thing that I am conscious off here is that if I've got other stakeholders that need to communicate with them openly because they are also relying on me for pieces of work. When I was very early in my career, I would try and fit everything in and try and please everyone. What I've learned over the last couple of years though, is often better to be upfront with people because people will appreciate that. And a lot of time people are very reasonable. They just need to know a timeline for things. As a manager, also, I'm often thinking of, are there other people on my team who have spare capacity, who could help, who could do the work themselves or who could provide QA later down the line in order of time as well. One thing that I usually think when we get an urgent requests like this is has something similar like this been done before. I'm all for efficiency and duplicating work is not very efficient. So if there has been a similar requests like this in the past, I will ask on the team has there has been done previously? So I'm going to assume that I'm gonna be doing the work and I've established that this is a priority for us. I've communicated with my other stakeholders about my other work and they are happy because it's not as urgent. What I'm gonna do now is start doing the piece of work. I'm gonna communicate with my manager openly because managers need to be kept in the loop because they are often hear in it from senior leaders. So they need to provide updates to senior leaders. Which is one thing I've learned over time is good to keep in constant contact, not constant contact, but regular contact with your manager to update them on progress. Particularly if there are any blockers in the work that you do it, it's important for managers to be not blind-sided by senior leaders when you come to them eight hours later and you say, oh yeah, actually I couldn't do it. That's not really good practice. I think you should keep in contact with them regularly, an update them on the progress of the work for them, It's cool work normally rely on someone else up to QA to work. So while I'm doing this, I'm going to be communicating with members on my team to see if anyone has capacity to check my work if there is no available. So maybe it's late one evening, then I'm gonna have to make it known with caveats that this work has been only QA by myself and therefore might not be a 100% accurate and they need to be okay with that. Then deliver the word to the customer and copy my manager in just so that they are kept in the loop. And going forward wildlife to do is have a catch up with that customer further down the line to see if you can provide any information to them that will ensure that these urgent requests don't come up. Again. Maybe they're not aware of products that you have on your team that may benefit them, that could answer the questions going forward. Anything to try and work out ways that we don't arrive at these urgent deadlines is something that I found really helpful in the past. Okay. So that is how I would answer the situational question. I think I went quite methodically through that and logically, and now I would like you to do the same. So it is your turn for the second part of your class project, which is answering a situational question on a different behavior than you did for your strength question. So choose a behavior different from the strength question. Go away and answer the situational question. And then when you're done with that, come back and we'll talk about past evidence questions. 26. Past Evidence Questions Part 1: The final behavior question that we're going to talk about today is the past evidence example question earlier in the class, in the application stage section, I talked about the framework that I use for given star examples. And you can definitely do this at the interview stage as well. However, the one thing that I really want you to be careful on is don't prep your answer too rigidly. The risk is that you prep really rigidly for a certain question to be asked. And then at the interview, if the question is asked in a slightly different way, a lot of people become thrown because they think, oh, wow, I've just prep for that specific case of the question and I didn't think about if it's asked in a different way, this is quite a dangerous game to play because you run the risk of not being able to adapt your answer on the spot. Instead, my approach is to think about the large pieces of work, the real pieces of work which have an impact in the roles that you've done in your current role. And then test these examples from multiple angles by answering multiple questions on them. You can also do this using the question, but I've included down in the description below, another thing to keep in mind is that remember earlier we are that annual staff survey analysis in the application stage. Well, that was a huge part of a job I had to use ago. You could talk about that example for different behaviors. So part of it could be about communicating, part of it could be about seeing the bigger picture. And that's completely allowed. You can use the same project for multiple behavior answers. Just be that in mind when you're at the interview, for instance, when communicating and influencing and talk about the communicating inside in your example, but also stress tests to see if you could talk about the influence inside for management of quality service. Yes, talk about an example where you've got a really high standard of customer service or maybe you went above and beyond. But also think about what if they ask about a time where you've dealt with an awkward customer could not be part of the same examples. Get what I mean. So you need to think of things from multiple angles for certain pieces of large work. A little trick that I like to use the I said on YouTube and a lot of people found helpful was to use straw instead of star. Straw is Situation task result of any action now as opposed to leave in the result until the end. The reason I say this is because I've observed people over the years. They spend a long time on the situation, the task, and the action that they did. But they often run out of time at the end with the result. Even if they don't run out of time, you run the risk of the panel just kind of losing interest in your answer. And I know that sounds harsh, but if you don't grab the attention with a result upfront, we're only human, like some people might switch off and get to the end and be like, wait, what was, what was the impact of all that you've just done? Why I like to do is really hit people with a result upfront. Say the answer, say the result, it quickly, and then you can talk about what you did to get up result. This is also a particularly good if the result was really good and you want to highlight it upfront. Another thing is after these interviews, you might be probed at the end and the usual probes might be along the lines of what would you do differently? What did you learn? So try and include that in your answer if you can. As a side note, if you are be improved I interview don't get thrown. It's just that the interview panel is trying to get you to touch on something that you perhaps missed. 27. Past Evidence Questions Part 2: Let's do an example of this with regards to leadership, let's answer the question. Can you give an example of its high and when you've had to take charge and give direction? I can recall a time a few years ago when I was a HCO analyst, I was working on the annual staff survey before the staff survey kicked off every year we had to do this thing called the hierarchy. The hierarchy where the codes that you fill in to answer the survey. And it wasn't a very pleasant piece of work to do because it was extremely high stakes and no one wanted to take ownership of it because things had gone wrong in the previous year, which meant there was a little bit angst amongst the business. This is obviously a crucial step because without the right codes, people can't fill it in and then obviously you can't track results over time. So I decided to step up to the plate and lead this work. I started up because I felt confident in my ability And I also worked on the survey the previous year as opposed to some members of the team who were a bit newer, I had to create the hierarchy and get input from various business partners across the organization. And this was quite difficult to get them involved because I think they had been stung a little from the mistakes the previous year. The result though is great because the hierarchy went off without a hitch. There were no complaints that year, which was a massive improvement in the previous year. I know it might not sound like a great deal, but that was a hugely important piece of work. And the fact that no one came back to us with complaints was a really positive sign for the team. So how did I go about doing this? Well, I always liked to lead by example and get really involved as much as I can in the details. There was a lot of push-back from people because it was an extremely time-intensive and difficult task. So what I did was role model behaviors and show people that are not expecting them to do all of the work. I'm happy to help you. I'm happy to be involved. I made it as easy as physically possible for people. I set up a SharePoint group, then put in a interactive Excel documents and highlighted all of the inputs for different people that I needed. This was really, really good for two reasons. It's efficient as opposed to having an email trail, like collated a bunch of emails. There was also really good because it showed that I was willing to do the work. All they had to do was just double-check my work essentially wherever I find myself in the situations where there is a little bit of pushback, I think a really positive attitude goes a long way. Don't try and take things personally. I just try and lead by example, I learned from those experiences that it's important to try and rebuild those relationships. If there has been maybe reputational damage amongst your team, maybe lost trust. I think it's really important to role model that you try to improve. Okay, so that was a very basic example using the straw based on a survey that I worked on a couple of years ago. The result was that the survey went off without a hitch, which was a massive improvement over the previous year and allow the organization to track it results over time. Now everyone, it is your turn for the final part of the mock interview. I would love you to answer the third and final class evidence question. Pick a behavior that you haven't done yet. So you'll have three separate behaviors to finish. Go away, film yourself, Answer the question. I'll see you in a minute. 28. Technical Interview Questions: Right, technical questions again, if you don't, anatomists go onto the next chapter unless you're interested in technical questions. But if you're applying for an analytical role, you will be asked technical questions, usually at the start of the interview before you get asked behavior questions in a stats role, I would recommend brushing up on two to three statistical tests as well as knowing the assumptions. So if you do an ANOVA, if you're doing a regression, know the assumptions, know why you would use those tests in certain situations. In my experience is better to know a few tasks really, really well as opposed to trying to remember all of them and just scratching the surface with a technical question that I've been asked in an analytical role into view is, what is your approach to data visualization when communicating with a non-technical audience? Another question could be talk us through a time where you've had to link data and what was your approach to quality assurance? I've also heard people talk about ways in which you can use social media with analysis, that can be a good question. How would you use social media in order to engage a non-technical audience with the insights of your analysis with regards to data visualization, my approach is always to check accessibility, make things as clean as possible. So don't use loads of different colors, generally, blues and oranges to highlight things work pretty well. If you have got a derivative, a visualization document that you all adhere to, essentially a policy. So maybe you use the same font answers. Everything on dashboards dies really nice way of ensuring consistency across products. One thing that I really liked to do with non-technical people is just ask them what they think the chart is telling them. And that's often quite telling because if they tell me something completely different than I know that I need to reject the visualization. I also like to present things in a clear way that is interactive. So if I'm building a dashboard in Tableau or Power BI, I like to ensure that these filters on it so that people can go away and answer their own questions. And I usually present these dashboards in a meeting and I will talk the customer through how to use them on what each thing means regards to link in datasets. This is an interesting question because this is something that I do quite often. I think that it's important to understand the context of all the datasets that you link in. Where do they come from? Who is a subject matter expert in them? Can I talk to them about each of the variables, what they mean, where they come from. I also think it's important to identify what keys you're gonna be using to join them on. Is there any issues with whitespace or one being float one-bit string does not gonna be an issue. It's all in the join. And then how do you check for consistency? How do you check for null values? What are you doing to ensure that nothing gets lost in the joint? There's so many questions when it comes to data link in. But by talking out loud like this, hopefully you'll get a sense of things that you can touch upon to ensure that your QA is consistent. So a lot of the time you'll see like levels of quality assurance. So if something is quite involved, maybe a large project that would need a higher level of assurance, which means that someone needs to spend quite a lot of time going through your code or going through it flows to see how you've joined things together. Whereas an irregular piece of work and normal request may require a basic level assurance using social media to promote analysis is actually a really interesting thing. I'm sure it's something that we do in more and more of. I don't actually do any of that myself because I tend to work on internal data, but I can definitely see that it's gonna be used. I'm sure people use it when publications and stuff like that. I think the thing for me would be using things like analogies. I think a lot of people can relate to good marketing. When people say, and this means the equivalent of this, I think the way people learn is understanding through analogies. Whereas when you say this is statistically significant and these are 95% chance that these people aren't going to understand that. Whereas when you put it in plain English with people and you say, well, this just means that it's probably not due to chance. Yeah, that makes sense. I think breaking things down into plain English and highlighting key figures is very important for social media. Those are my thoughts on technical questions. I hope that helps you all. If you do have any other questions, drop them down below, or maybe send me a connection requests on LinkedIn. I try and get back to as many people as I possibly can. 29. Quick Round Questions 1: Now we've talked about both types of behavior questions. We've talked about situational and past evidence examples. And now I felt I'd like to finish this section by doing a quick fire round. So I've compiled a list of all the questions that I can think all for all of the nine behaviors, I'm just going to throw them out view, I would recommend you pause. I'll give some faults as well. And I felt this would be a nice way to finish this section, as I've said previously as well, there are a bunch more questions down in the description below. There's a document called question by and I would highly recommend you go into the practice prior to our interviews. Kick it off with seeing the bigger picture. You've been asked to drive forward a new organization strategy and get various teams in the business to understand the roles. How would you go about doing this? First thing which comes to mind with me is this is an engagement piece. So it's all about getting stakeholders together, getting them to understand why this strategy is important, what we're trying to achieve, and more importantly, what it means for them and how they can contribute. That is what I would be thinking about. Think about how you would influence people. So would you be using the benefits? Would you use data? How would you deal with any awkward customers? That is what I would be thinking in this situation. A pass to evidence example for seeing the bigger picture could be something like give me an example of a time we all work has helped contribute to the wider aims of the organization. Now in the civil service, you may often hear the golden thread mentioned. Now when I first did this, I thought, oh, it's another buzzword. What it essentially means is how does everything in the thread all feed into the alignment and the vision of the organization. Do that exercise when you think of questions like this, ask yourself, why are you doing this work, right? Moving on to leadership, a situational question could be something like your manager's phone into work unwell and your director has asked you to step in and give a team update at the monthly bold needed. This involves updating the board on the progress of the team and it's something that you have never done. How would you approach this situation? The first thing that I would be thinking if I've never been in this situation before is what is the format that the bold like what they used to, what was my team leader done in the past? I would try and find any examples like that. If I think that I could maybe improve upon it, I may try, but depending on the tight turnaround, I probably wouldn't have time in this instance after that, I would be asking various team members who are in charge of different projects and different pieces of work. I would ask them in an email to give me a quick update on where they're at. A past evidence example for leadership could look something like, can you describe a time when you've received challenge as a leader, you need to start thinking of different ways to answer these questions. This question is a prime example. It's talking about the challenges of leadership. What have you, I'm working on a piece of work and you've received challenge from other people or whenever you've been leading a project and received a lot of conflict in ideas. Think about those sorts of times, right, moving on to making effective decisions. A situational question could look like you're working on a project and have discovered that there are multiple datasets that give different results. How would you decide on what you should use as evidence? Difficult question because you have multiple forms of the truth, which actually happens more than you might believe. This is testing to see your understanding of how do you interact with people in order to find out what processes that have gone through, where the data's coming from and then how do you form a decision based on those discussions in a past evidence example for making effective decisions could look like give me an example of where you've had to collate or CIF different sources of information to arrive at a decision. These assertions as well don't have to be huge. So this definitely something to think about. They can just be team structure or a way that you do your work. Just make sure that you can demonstrate you have option a and option B. And also the other thing to bear in mind here is that don't make it. So that option a is like no one would ever do that, and option B is clearly the winner. 30. Quick Round Questions 2: Moving on to communicate in an influencing, a situational question that I have actually been asked in the past is as follows. You have asked to draft board level paper for your director on the progress and actions of a project you've been working on, what would be your communication approach for this question is designed to test your ability to adapt to your audience in terms of written communication. If you communicate in our board level a lot of the time it's a far less detailed brief than dealing with say, another colleague or an analyst or a coworker. And then a past evidence example question could be described. A situation in which you were able to influence positively the actions of others in a desired direction. This is a little bit of a weird question, but what it's essentially saying is, can you give me a time where you've had to influence someone to see your point of view and the result was positive. So maybe they went with what you would want it to do, or maybe you decided on a happy medium. Think about those times where you've had to use influence, right? Moving onto changing and improving a situational question could be you've been on a training course learning about project management and team structure. You have a lot of ideas and think guilty and could improve. How would you present your ideas to the team leader? I really like this question because it is asking you to utilize the training that you've learned a bit like I have in this class where I've asked you to do a class project in form of a mock interview. One thing I would focus on here though, is if you don't have a manager who is receptive to change, what would you do in that situation? Notice how I'm always thinking of different options that could HCOOH with situational questions and then a past evidence question. Tell us about a time when you have overcome problems when introducing a new approach, always have work here. So whenever we improve, its never smooth sailing completely. It's never like, Oh, we've got this idea, I'm just going to implement it. There's always push back, There's always barriers to overcome. This question is asking about how did you overcome those barriers? Were they IT problems? Did you have issues getting certain things installed? Team structure, was there push back, think about all those types of examples. Moving on to working together a situational question you will lead in on a project that involves multiple departments and each area thinks the project should go in a certain direction. What is your approach to projects involving multiple teams? So this question is about working with multiple teams, not just with your immediate team. And it's asking you to describe your approach. It's often quite difficult to work with a bunch of different teams because obviously everyone has their own IT priorities. What would your approach be? What have you learned in the past from the situations? And then a past evidence question. Give an example of when you have managed a team effectively. Again, if you don't manage your team directly, think about a time when maybe you've helped out another team on a project because you are essentially manager team then think about a time when you've worked on a piece of work with another colleague, how did he manage that little team? You don't have to be managing people or managing a team to show leadership skills. 31. Quick Round Questions 3: For delivering a pace, a situational question could be as follows. You find yourself working on multiple high-stake projects at once voiceover approach to prioritizing in this situation, this happens a lot when you become more and more senior. So the question here is asking, what is your approach to prioritizing? How do you ensure that everything is getting done but also not become to stress too overwhelmed? What is your approach to priority? This is why I think agile working with particularly well where you have sprint Sadie stand-ups weekly, metros. It keeps everyone accountable and you're very, very certain of what needs to be achieved in that sprint. A past evidence question could be about a time when you fail to hit a deadline despite your best effort. I think this is probably happened to all of us. I like this question because it forces you to reflect on a potential failure and really share what you learn from that experience. Try and think about what you did wrong in this situation. Did you take on too much at once? Did you fail to communicate with people and how would you change going forward if you were in this situation? Again, it's one thing that I would encourage you to think about a lot is try and think about times when things didn't go as well. And also have those in your back pocket. Because if you're always thinking of examples where everything went smoothly and you achieved quite a lot and it was a big project and a huge success. And if you've got asked a question like this, which is testing more of a weakness, more of an example when things didn't go to plan, you might be caught off guard. So try and think of things from both sides. Managing quality, service, a situation question that I think you could be asked. Someone has requested a piece of work that you know, won't answer the question, but still insists how would you focus on still providing the best possible customer service? This is something that I think happens to all of us. So think about those times when you've really hard to maybe educate people. Maybe you've shown them the work that they wanted, but you think that they should have this. I think this one is all about communication and trying to understand what the customer is really trying to achieve. And then an evidence-based question could be given an example of a time where you have gone above and beyond for a customer. I think this is a good example to really show off, really, really try and think of a time where you've gone above and beyond, you've given it your max effort possible. I mean, it's paid off, particularly if you interact with a lot of customers, maybe on the phone, maybe via email, try and think of a time where maybe you received a lot of good feedback from doing something because you went above and beyond the expectations. Maybe the customer as well was someone on a different team and you were helping them out to achieve the goals. Try and think of a time where you went above and beyond for another team. And then last but not least, developing self and others. I really liked this behavior. I've never been asked it unfortunately, but I think it's a good one. A situation type question could be you are working with someone who is delivered work that isn't up to standard, but they are unaware. How would you approach this situation? What all the time developing others is being able to give them feedback in a way that allows them to improve. This can often be very difficult if they are very happy with what they've done and they perhaps on a way or naive to the fact that it's not up to standard. This is judging you based on how can you have those conversations. What do you do? How do you approach these things? One thing that I like to do is cold sandwich. You basically deliver really good news, some upfront. So I'm super happy with how enthusiastic you are. And I think that's something that you should definitely keep going forward. And then you do the layer in the middle, which is the thing you can improve. So you say, have noticed however, that there are a few things that I think we could improve upon and I'm going to put in some time for us to go through these in a different section. But then he finished the sandwich with more good. You say, I really, really loved your enthusiasm. No, I don't want this to discourage you. It's my job to make sure that you improve and become better. So that's why I'm giving you this feedback. Then for the past evidence question, you could be asked something like tell us about a time where you applied learning or training to an aspect of your role. I really liked this question because if you are reading books outside of work, if you are going on training courses, this is your time to say, Well, I learned this and then I applied it to that. So this is a good question to demonstrate that you are actually applying the things that you are learning to something that you In your role. Maybe it's communication, maybe it's technical stuff, maybe it's your leadership style. Think about all of those things. 32. FAQs: Before we wrap up the end of this class, I'm just going to answer some frequently asked questions I get about the civil service into process. So I've got these written down here. I'm gonna read through them. What makes an excellent written behaviour examples stand out for me. I think a clear structure and that is something that I hope you get from the framework that I provided. I also think it's really important to highlight the result, particularly if it's something that has a big impact with numbers, something that's tangible. I think that's really, really good. And if you can also demonstrate that you learn something from it in the process, that's even better. One thing I really like about written examples is if it's written in a very direct, clear way, no wall fall straight to the point. That's the type of example I tried to get. Moving on. Are there any common mistakes you see people make our interview? Yes, domain one is with the situational question. People will just give an example, and unfortunately it does not walked anyone's looking for, but I understand why people do it. Hopefully if you watch the chapter about situational questions, you won't make that same mistake. Another one that I see people make all the time is people say we instead of I, I think people do this because they're trying to be humble and they don't want to brag that I did this, I did that. I'm not that good at selling ourselves sometimes all we, but I think it's really important to take ownership. I did this idea that don't say we, I mean another thing, I think people make the mistake and they cover letters. I think people just to walk fully, I think we all just adding filler words to avoid being direct and to the point because they feel like that's blunt. I know I used to do that, but now I really think that's good communication. What do you can just be clear and direct. It makes it easier for the reader to understand what you did and what you're trying to get across. Can you use examples that are not work-related? Yes. If you don't have work-related examples, if you're a student, if you're in unit, then yes, by all means, I would think about you-all school or university experience as well because they will be valuable experience in that. But yeah, if you haven't got any work experience, then try and use outside of work. If you volunteer, if you lead a team, all of those types of things, try and think about that. How long do you get to speak PR behavior? I think for strength questions it's three minutes and then I think for situational and past evidence it is 45 minutes, but don't that when answering questions in an interview, do interview panels tend to make it clear what behavior is being asked now for strength questions, they won't. They'll just say, are you good at communicating? After the strength question, they will tell you. It asks you to strength question on, you'll probably guess what the behavior is and then it'll say right now we, we're going to ask you a few questions about seeing the bigger picture or whatever, okay, so how can you get the panel's attention back if you feel like you've lost them. I think this happens when people aren't clear on their example on they may be a bit waffling. I think what I've done in the past is say, I feel like I've done a little bit off track. Can you repeat the question because I want to answer it properly. I've also seen people asked about is it okay to have notes? I definitely think it's okay to have some sticky notes and flashcards. I wouldn't recommend having a booklet of examples though. I don't feel like you don't want to be looking for an example. I don't think that's a good idea personally anyway, if it works for you, then carry on. But yeah, by all means, have sticky notes and stuff open on your computer. Yeah. Go for it. 33. Questions for the Panel: This is a quick chapter, but something that I don't think people think about enough. And that is what questions to ask the panel. At the end of the interview, you'll always be given the chance to ask the panel questions. I don't feel like people think about this enough. I'm going to give you some questions I think you could ask in order to get a better insight about the role that you're applying for. One thing that I often like to ask is how would you describe the culture at your organization? And then you'll get a sense of how attached people are to where they work. They've been there a long time. Do they enjoy what they do, etc. Another one which I often ask is what does success look like in this role? That gives me an idea of what I would need to do in order to be good at this role. And then I decide, is this a good fit, another one, because I'm always trying to improve things and I'm also trying to pinpoint what's going wrong. I often ask people what's currently the biggest problem on your team a lot of the time, they may not answer fully. They don't want to give you that the nitty-gritty, but they'll definitely share some of the pain points that they have. And then that makes me think, Okay, Maybe I could help them do in this. I've done this in the past, etc. Then in order to get an idea of the vision for the team, I asked them, what are they striving to achieve at the moment, this is really good because it allows me to see whether they actually think about where they go in, in the future or are they just stuck in the day to day? I want to be a part of things which have quite a large vision. So that's the reason that I asked that question. 34. Interview Day: Another quick chapter. I'm going to give you some advice for interview day because I feel like people get very stressed about interviews. One thing that I like to do is exercise before the interview. I find if I go to the run, if I go to the gym, I am far more relaxed, I'm far less anxious. What it leads up to the interview itself. A lot of people worry about what to way. I always dress smart, so I always wear a tie, trousers, shoes. I even put shoes on even if I'm at home being remotely interviewed because I just stopped me in the zone that gets me into the environment. I think most interviews are remote nowadays, so it may feel a little bit weird. But gents, if you are watching, I usually wear shirt and tie. If you're wondering, obviously make sure you check all of the technology and the manager tip that I have for you is if you're on a laptop or a tablet, check when the camera is and put a little sticky note by the side of it with some notes because then you can look at your notes and it looks like you're looking at the panel which is obviously good to maintain eye contact. You don't want to be looking down at yourself in the bottom right corner of a Teams call. 35. Books for Development: For anyone who is interested on, is really looking to develop. I've read a few books over the years that have really helped me in my career so far. The first one is called surrounded by idiots. This is based on some personality tests using the insights color wheel, you may have seen it. It's quite similar to the Myers-Briggs stuff and things like that. This was really good for a few reasons. It helped me to work with people who are different in characteristics, understand why they may react to certain things, and more importantly, why I may react to certain things. It helped me learn a lot about myself and a lot about certain personality types and how to work together with people for working together, leadership, communicate and influencing, surrounded by Idiots is a really good book. I will put a link down to it in the description. Crucial conversations is also a really good book for communicating and particularly with influencing. And it's really good at having those potential conflict situations where you don't agree with people how to have those difficult conversations. And I've used a lot of times throughout my career, not for really bad conflict or anything, but when you get a sense, a conversation is maybe not becoming productive. It's a really good book to help you get on track. So I would highly recommend crucial conversations. We find a book that I'm going to recommend to you is talk like Ted. This is someone who studied all of the TED talks over the last, however many years. And they've analyzed what makes the best talks, which is really, really helpful. There is a few, I think, nine or ten points that make up a good tool. And you can use these quite quickly in your day to day job. And you can learn about what goes into making a good presentation, what gets people to buy in. I've used it quite a lot with my YouTube channel and I would highly recommend talk like Ted, That's a really good book for communicate and influence. It. 36. Conclusion: Everyone is the end of my class. I think I didn't lie down because my voice is going, it was light when I started and now it's completely pitch black. I really, really hope you enjoyed this class. I hope that it gives you everything you could possibly need in order to get a job in the civil service is a great place to work. The final thing is if you did enjoy this class, please leave me a rating at a comment down below. Let me know what you think and share it with someone who maybe has an application or an interview coming up within the civil service. I hope you all have a great day and you get the jobs that you're after and I wish you all the best in your careers. That's all from me. Goodbye and take care.