As I had my stage 3 yesterday I thought I'd just do a quick post for anyone else going through this stage of selection:
My stage 3 was at Swanwick, I got there a little before 8am. Security at Swanwick is tighter and a bit more complicated than at the CTC so I'd advise leaving yourself a little extra time. There were six candidates including myself which I think is pretty standard. A little before 9 we met the assessors and were taken up to the HR offices. There were four assessors, I think three were HR and one was an ATCO from Prestwick.
The first part of the day is the group exercise. This lasts for about an hour and is a structured exercise designed so that the assessors can observe you working in a team. Its basically a board game, each candidate is given their own set of objectives and starts out by planning a solution to the game by themselves that will meet all their objectives. After this all the candidates have to come together to plan a single solution to the game that meets every individual candidates' objectives as well as a number of additional team objectives. You get 25 mins to do this. Further team objectives and additional rules are continually added to the game as it progresses.
Apparently the assessors are not at all interested in your solution to the game, the purpose of the exercise is to allow them to assess how you work as part of a group. We didn't finish the exercise in the time allowed (I think most groups don't) and I suspect it is probably impossible to come up with a solution that meets all the objectives (if it is possible I'd be very suprised if any group were able to find such a solution in the time permitted). Basically, don't worry too much about the game, instead you need to focus on how the team is working and how you fit into that team. You don't necessarily have to be a "leader" to do well - they are looking for you to work well as a team player so don't be a walkover but similarly you need to take note of everyone else's ideas and priorities and sometimes you will need to defer to them or sacrifice your priorities to acheive team goals.
After the team exercise the assessors split into pairs and started the interviews (two candidates at a time). Four candidates were interviewd before lunch, I was one of the two who had to wait until after. The interviews lasted about 1 1/2 hours for each candidate.
The interview is a structured (or "competency based") interview. If you've not had this type of interview before then I'd highly recommend doing some research into how this type of interview works as it is very different to the more normal kind of non-structured interview you may have had for other jobs, university etc. In a normal interview the assessors ask questions designed to allow you to demonstrate quite generally the kind of person you are. This type of interview can be very subjective and depends entirely upon the impression the assessors get of you. Structured interviews work very differently; in a structured interview every question is designed to give you the opportunity to demonstrate whether or not you possess a specific character trait or competency and your answers are marked against a set of predetermined criteria. This kind of interview is much more objective and rather than coming out of it with a general impression of who you are the assessors end up with a score quantifying how well you match up to the criteria they have determined are most important for the role.
The list of competencies you are being assessed for is available here:
http://atcocareers.co.uk/pdf/Hints-a...-Day-Three.pdf
Familiarise yourself with this list well. You will be asked two questions to help you demonstrate each compentency. In each question (apart from the ATC motivation questions) you will be asked to describe a specific scenario you have been in where you have been presented with a certain challenge or have acted in a certain way which relates to the competency. You will then be asked further questions about your scenario to help the assessors determine how you handled the situation, what things you took into consideration when determining how to act etc. Generally the first question you are asked for each competency will be about a time you have successfully worked in an environment that tested a that competency, the second will often (but not always) then be about a time in which you were unable to work successfully (I assume they want to see if you were able to learn from your mistakes and how well you are able to assess your own reasons for failure).
Its worth noting that for every question you have to give a specific example of scenario you have been in. You can't make any generalisations, they want a specific scenario and they want to know specifically how you acted in that scenario and what you were thinking about when making your decisions. I'd highly recommend thinking about specific examples based on the list in the document before the interview day (at least two for each competency). I also made a list of all the different activities I do and past jobs I've had so that if a question came up that I couldn't match one of my prepared answers to I could very quickly think through my list to try and recall a suitable scenario, this helped me a lot. Don't worry too much if you are struggling to come up with a really clever example, any example will do no matter how trivial - they aren't particularly interested in the actual example but want to understand how you reacted and how you decided what course of action to take as this can tell them a lot about how you might cope and behave in situations that will test similar competencies if they give you the job.
The only exception to the above were the questions about ATC motivation. For these they are looking for a more general picture of why you want to be and ATCO and are also keen to see how much you understand about what the job and the training entails. For this all I can say is that having been on a few visits to control towers or area centres makes an absolute world of difference: I felt I was able to answer questions about what ATCOs do every day with so much more confidence and authority having visited some of these facilities and had the opportunity to watch ATCOs at work and ask them questions.
After the interview we then got the opportunity to view the LACC ops room (quite a site to behold) and had a short briefing on how it all works and what all the different people were responsible for.
The day finished about 4.30, the thumb twiddling and constant checking of my inbox begins....
If anyone has any questions I'd be happy to help.
P
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