Week 2: Presenting: Passing Assessment Centres with Flying Colours

Hi Everyone,

I’m an ICAEW Campus Ambassador currently studying English and Drama at the University of Kent. I’m doing a series of weekly blogs for 6 weeks about the skills I learned studying Business Administration and Mandarin at the University of California Berkeley’s Haas Business School. These blogs cover what skills employees look for and how you can foster these in yourself to ensure you get the graduate job you want.

In this blog, I will talk about how my experiences in my year abroad improved my presentation skills and the importance of presentation skills when applying for graduate jobs, especially during graduate employer assessment centres.

With big competition for sought-after graduate jobs, assessment centres have now become an important part of the recruitment process. And as part of this, so have presentations. For many of us, myself included, the words ‘assessed presentation’ can bring a pang of terror! So hopefully the next two blogs will provide useful suggestions on how to improve your presentation skills.

You may be asked to present on a specific topic at short-notice at the assessment centre, but more likely you will have been asked in advanced, so there’s plenty of time to practise. And as ever, practise makes perfect, and taking the opportunity to present as much as possible is the best way to improve your skills. Often, you can find these opportunities in your classes. For instance, one of the best classes I did in California was ‘Entrepreneurship’, where we launched a mobile tech product and ultimately presented the idea and company to a panel of investors. On top of this, I was involved in two assessed ‘Real Estate’ presentations where knowing the figures off the top of my head was essential. These were stressful; but throwing yourself in the deep end like this, is often the best way to improve. 

At the same time, real improvement only comes when you do something regularly. So the challenge of doing weekly presentations in my ‘Leadership’ class developed a tolerance to failure. The teacher made it very clear that we shouldn't worry about messing up, which many of us regularly did, me included. What was important was that we were getting up and doing it with about 10 minutes preparation. As a result, the whole class developed a very supportive atmosphere and we all saw tremendous improvements in our presentation skills, mainly because we were losing our fear and speaking spontaneously. Put simply, you have to practice and do so regularly.

So make sure you get practising any way you can!

As ever, if you have any comments or questions at all please go ahead and I’ll be sure to get help any way I can.

Next week I will be sharing with you some well-practiced, solid techniques used by business professionals in order to negotiate and persuade, so you can create the perfect pitch. So be sure to join me next week!





For more information about assessment centres visit the ICAEW website at:

http://careers.icaew.com/school-students-leavers/Student-support/Careers-advisers

If you’ve been inspired by reading this blog, it may surprise you that all of these skills are used in a graduate career as an ICAEW Chartered Accountant.

Discover how you can become an ICAEW Chartered Accountant at http://www.icaew.com/careers

See when the ICAEW Student Recruitment Team (UK) will be on your campus this autumn and message them at http://www.facebook.com/icaewcareers