Successful cabin crew are excellent team players so you should expect to be assessed on your ability to demonstrate your commitment to your team-work during your assessment day. A good way of seeing how you realistically work with others under pressure is during the group exercises. These exercise can REALLY vary, but here are some examples:
This presents very much like the one to one role-play exercise except that there may be several actors/airline crew/assessors involved. For instance, during the exercise you may need to take the role of a member of cabin crew and the other people involved in the exercise could be passengers or part of your cabin crew team. The main difference will be that the other personnel in the Group exercise will have all been ‘assigned roles’ and so they already know how the scenario is going to play out but YOU DONT!. Look at this exercise positively, you have more people in positions of support for what you are trying to achieve, so don’t be apprehensive, meet the challenge head on as this type of exercise is actually often a lot of fun! You will just need to stay on your toes, listen to what the others are saying and provide your best response in that scenario. Generally you will be issued with an objective for the exercise in the instructions e.g. to deal with a work-related problem, so just ensure that you keep your focus and suggestions around what will help to achieve the required outcome in the most positive way possible.
In this assessment there will be a group of candidates who are all given a topic to discuss. Assessors will primarily be observing the way that you all interact with each other. They will also look at how you participate in the discussion so that they can get a better picture of how you communicate in a team situation and how constructive you are at resolving issues that may arise. Your language style when dealing with others individually or as a group is relevant and can be insightful when assessing suitability. So make sure you are constructive, not dismissive of others, supportive and innovative, non-judgemental and dynamic! Don’t worry if you don’t have specific knowledge of the topic for discussion it is what you say and how you say that is the important issue here, not what you know about the topic chosen necessarily. You just need to positively contribute and be seen and heard to be doing just that!.
The assessment day isn’t just about you being assessed- it’s also your opportunity to make sure that the job is right for you. Many of the activities/ exercises will use realistic scenarios to give you a ‘preview’ of aspects of the role.
In this situation you and a few other candidates who are attending the assessment day will all be given a task to work together to complete. It may be something relevant to a cabin crew role or possibly it will be presented as a type of game (although currently this is less favoured as an approach as it can be outdated). However in order to help you prepare for all possibilities the games may be based on a discussion such as ‘if you were stranded on a desert island with limited supplies how would you choose to allocate roles to the survivors? You would make a list of decision based on group discussion and shared outcomes which would need to be agreed or explained so agreement is reached effectively. The key it is a ‘Group’ exercise which is designed for you to achieved shared, joint decisions based on the scenario you are presented with. There are no right or wrongs necessarily it’s about the process you use to achieve an equitably outcome, through shared decision making. The important thing in this situation isn’t who you pick from the list of characters but how you work with the rest of the group to make the selections.
Another type of group exercise may be activity based e.g. you may be given a physical puzzle to solve, out of blocks or other props, or perhaps asked to build a ‘raft’ which you then need to be able to use to transport people across a hall without touching the ground. Group exercises can be creative so it’s difficult for you to know what to expect exactly. But irrespective of what you are asked to do, it is the how you do it which is always crucial.
Packed with hints and tips on how to perform at your best in different kinds of exercise, this will also give you the scoop on what the recruitment team are looking for in the group exercises.