It can be tough trying to understand what employers or traineeships are looking for exactly.
Do you know what you have to offer, as you transition into a new industry or into the workforce for the first time or to a new level of seniority? Have you ever taken the time to walk through your experience and skills to see what’s transferable? Have you ever clearly articulated your value? Have you ever wondered how the winners in promotions or recruitment describe themselves?
It’s important to take ownership of your skills profile: what you have to offer in the marketplace. It might not be quite what you think. I will help you with:
A personal audit of what you are good at, what you know, and what drives you
Viewing yourself as a value offering in the labour market
Packaging your skills and knowledge into pitches that are useful in recruitment
Feeling comfortable with self-promotion while remaining authentic
A practical plan for your next steps, that’s based on reality
The main tool in behavioural interviewing is asking competency questions and competency frameworks are the basis for this. They are designed for hirers to conceptualise their ideal target employee for a role. So competency questions ask about your actual experience: ‘Can you walk me through how…’ or ‘Describe a time when…’ or ‘Have you ever…’
Have you ever done a storm of your professional life to find and match examples with the exact criteria in a competency framework? Have you practised explaining them in concise but optimal ways?
Understanding these frameworks and knowing how to answer the questions is critical. This type of interviewing is often a screening step before meetings with hiring managers, although many such managers are also trained up in asking and assessing them too.
It’s easy to search online to find basic structure for these. What’s harder is framing stories in a way they won’t seem isolated, and optimising the particular part that is actually assessed. I will help you:
- Learn where to find the competencies you need to talk about
- Understand how competencies scale up and down for different levels of seniority
- Learn how to structure your answers (basic) and optimise their content (advanced)
- Learn how hirers actually assess your answers and practise tailoring to this
- Learn where to find the competencies you need to talk about
- Understand how competencies scale up and down for different levels of seniority
- Learn how to structure your answers (basic) and optimise their content (advanced)
- Learn how hirers actually assess your answers and practise tailoring to this
More specifically facing a leadership assessment is a daunting task. The most harrowing among my finance clients was someone flown from London to Washington several times for meetings, including one with a high-profile psychologist.
Have you ever done an audit of your life to bring into focus all the attributes and competencies of leadership you’ve shown? Are you comfortable articulating these? Do you think they fit neatly against theoretical leadership models?
Seminal ideas on leadership spanning a century can be distilled and mapped to fit against your experience. This can ensure you’re on the same page as the assessor – using their own leadership lexicon, whether it be about being transformational, participative, situational, or about culture creation, ‘sowing seeds’, ‘carrying the torch’, or fostering thought leadership, and more. I will help you to:
- Tease this out across a comprehensive leadership competency and attribute framework
- Develop strong narratives to demonstrate each of these leadership competencies.
- Distinguish between transactional and truly transformational leadership.
- Walk through contrasting circumstances that need situational leadership approaches.
"I reached out to Tony when I was contemplating a career move - the advice and assistance he gave me was invaluable. Having been in the Executive Search space myself, I was very impressed with the transition coaching and communication impact coaching he gave me. Tony’s input was compelling both strategically and tactically to my plans and I highly recommend anyone to consult Tony if contemplating or undertaking a career move."
"Inspiring - Tony has patiently guided me along a path to career enlightenment. Enabling me to achieve clarity and define a vision for my future. He has set mechallenges which ultimately helped me understand my core drivers and the value I can add."
"Tony's guidance as a speech and presentation coach were transformative for me. He helped me understand my motivations and inhibitions. At the start he told me his goal was to make himself redundant as fast as possible. He helped overcome the blockages with impressive speed and insight. I have already recommended Tony to several colleagues."
"Tony showed me how to demonstrate my strengths in a format employers recognise. He helped in every aspect of the process, from the way to behave, to having solid answers to questions I was likely to be asked (and they really did come up!)"
