If you’ve been on the hunt for an apprenticeship, chances are you’ve been invited to an assessment centre to undertake some tests. Don’t worry, it’s not as scary as it sounds, but here’s what you should prepare for when you’re evaluated for your dream apprenticeship.
Personality questions
A personality test is fairly common when your being assessed for an apprenticeship and they are usually repetitive and honestly, quite boring.
These tests will determine whether you have the correct personality traits to perform well during your apprenticeship.
There are many different types of personality questions, but one of the most common is a statement based question. You may receive the following statement:
‘I am confident that work accidents won’t happen to me.’
You will then be asked to rank how far you agree with this statement on scale of 1-5, which would span from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree.’
Situational judgement test
In one of these tests, you will be presented with theoretical situations that one day might occur during your apprenticeship.
For example, you may be asked ‘An angry customer confronts you about a faulty product – how do you approach the situation?’
Psychometric tests
There are two types of psychometric tests and both are designed to find out whether you have the basic aptitudes and qualities to do well during your apprenticeship.
An IQ Test is a very common psychometric test and is built to test your intelligence. The test contains questions which measure your logic and verbal ability in order to obtain your ‘mental age’ the subject’s mental age. The average IQ score is 100.
CTPI-100: The Central Test Personality Inventory for Professionals is a personality test which will ascertain whether your traits will suit the type of apprenticeship you’re applying for.
Verbal reasoning tests
For a verbal reasoning test, you will have to answer questions relating to a certain passage of text.
Once presented with the statement, you will have to identify it as either true, false, or neither. You have to base your answers on the info given in the text, not on your own knowledge, this way apprenticeship assessors will be able to see if you can cope with your potential new tasks.