King’s Careers & Employability runs different kinds of appointments for students and graduates. Let’s talk about what our practice interviews are like and how you can maximise your experience when meeting with a career consultant before your big interview day.
Helping you build success
Maybe you already know a little about our currently virtual careers services. Our KEATS pages are your first point of information, support and guidance about careers that you have access to anytime, anywhere. Next, we encourage you to look into events and workshops to support you around your career journey.
If you feel that you would like further, one-to-one guidance in addition to using our other services, we have bookable appointments via King’s CareerConnect. There are several kinds of appointments that you can select and book to, depending on your current situation. Today, let’s talk about the application advice appointment. The following blog paragraphs have been written in collaboration with career consultant Beka Kimberley.
What is a Practice Interview Appointment and how can it benefit students?
A practice interview is an hour-long or 40-minute long appointment to help you prepare for an interview that you have coming up. A practice interview appointment is a time where you can reflect on yourself and how you present your knowledge, skills, attributes and experiences in an interview setting. You also have the chance to practice interview answers and techniques with the help of a career consultant. The practice interview is a safe learning space that is there to support your unique situation – and we will adapt the session to suit your needs.
There are several benefits of booking to a practice interview appointment: you will have a chance to revise your interview technique and how best to present your answers so that on the day you are feeling confident and ready. You also have the chance to ask questions and talk about any worries or anxieties regarding your upcoming interview, for which your career consultant can offer advice and reassurance.
What can students expect the experience to be like?
The session normally starts with a chat about the interview itself, how you’re feeling, how much preparation you’ve done and if there’s anything in particular that you want to focus on.
Sometimes students have questions about interviews and assessment centres in general. We are happy to answer these and help you feel more confident about the big day. Questions about what to wear and how to present yourself well during a group exercise are quite common! Recently people have used this time to check their setup for remote interviews over Zoom or Teams.
The main part of the practice interview is usually the careers consultant asking you their prepared questions and giving you feedback on how to improve your answers. This is your time so feel free to ask if you want to practice the same question multiple times, focus on a certain style of interview question or power through as many questions as possible.
Your careers consultants can give you the questions they prepared so that you can go through them in your own time as well. Students usually make huge improvements over the course of their practice interview and it can really help build your confidence for the real thing.
Check out our other blogs on interviews: Top 5 Tips on Making Your Virtual Interview a Success and How to Talk About Your Degree in an Interview
What is the best way to make the most of the appointment?
After you’ve booked your appointment, your careers consultant will always prepare questions based on the information you’ve given via your booking. It really helps us if you can give as much information as you have about the job and the upcoming interview process! In addition, I would highly recommend looking at our KEATS pages on preparing for interviews, practising your answers using Interview Stream or attending one of our workshops. These will give you a good grounding of basic interview knowledge we can build on.
Think of it this way: if a student comes in, and has not had the time to prepare with our resources or looked at our KEATS pages, the appointment will likely focus on the general aspects of interviews. However, if a student comes in having already taken part in a career workshop on interview skills and has looked over our KEATS online education material, then the appointment can really focus on polishing the student’s interview technique beyond the basics and help them make the most of their interview.
You can really benefit from practising your interview ahead of the big day. During the Autumn term, virtual Practice Interview appointments are available on King’s CareerConnect between Monday and Friday. It is worth noting that we are very busy during this time of year. If at first you don’t find a free slot for an appointment, you might need to re-visit the booking platform a few times more during the day and refresh in case there are cancellations.
Interested in booking an appointment? For this, visit King’s CareerConnect.
Our other blogs on the Appointments series:
How to make the most of a Careers Guidance Appointment?