WWW's big BA CEP posting
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WWW's big BA CEP posting
So these are my collected scribbles with reference to the BA CEP scheme. I am in no way connected to BA (alas!) and bear in mind that I failed to get the BA CEP not once but twice...
General - The BA CEP used to ‘open’ for a few weeks and then close. Only when it was open could you get an application form. This is no longer the case and the scheme seems to be open indefinitely. The telephone number for an application form has changed once or twice so just call BA Customer Services or Directory Enquiries. BA are easily going to need over 100 Cadets each year for the next couple of years. This means you may well be able to apply for a second or third time. The upper age limit is now 26. Be warned that should you fail you have to wait for a year before re-applying. The CEP scheme is administered through BA’s Meadowbank site in Hounslow near Heathrow. This is where testing takes place. You can call Meadowbank and ask to speak to a recruitment advisor. Don’t do this as a matter of course or you will really swamp them. However you may be able to find out where you are in the process, current waiting times and so forth. You may also be able to gain feedback from them should you fail the last stage (not the aptitudes or application form). Try writing as its more polite and easier for them to deal with. They can de-brief you over the telephone usually. Talking of stages there are three really. Stage One is the application form. Stage Two is the Aptitude testing day at Meadowbank. Stage Three is interviews. Pass stage three and subject to a medical you’re in. It takes some people months and months to pass these stages. I last did the whole lot in less a month. Things vary and don’t read too much into it. You can claim petrol allowances for travel to Meadowbank but accommodation is no longer covered I believe. Claim forms are available from the reception desk of Meadowbank. You can always park on a sidestreet a block or two away from Meadowbank.
OK lets talk about the application form. To get the form you will have to answer a few screening questions over the telephone. A few days later an application form should arrive through the post. It is huge and will take you many hours to complete. Make some photocopies and practice filling it out. Keep a copy of the form as you sent it in - its really embarrassing trying to remember your slightly overstated claims to fame at an interview 6 months later! Don’t worry about flying experience too much. They’ve happily taken people with no hours at all through to people with 200 and a few ratings. The main body of the form are four questions requiring essay style answers of about a page. Liable to change slightly they run along the lines of 'Show a time when you displayed good team working and leadership skills', 'Show a time when you worked under pressure or had to change your plan', 'Show how you are dedicated and hard working', 'Show how you are determined to succeed and why you want to be a BA Pilot'. That kind of thing.
So how do we go about answering this then. Well make sure you do at least three drafts and do get someone else to read through your answer before you write it up. Its often tricky to spot your own poor structure etc. Try to think of different aspects of your life to draw the examples from. It can be very easy to, say, draw on your time in the Air Training Corps solely to answer the questions. This gets tedious for the reader and you want to be projecting the old ‘well rounded character’ image. You’ll end up with the usual suspects of schools, sport, University societies etc. You don’t have to be Mr Original because 99 percent of people must write about the same sort of thing. However, you can write about similar things in a better way if you make the effort. Always bear in mind the notes they give you of writing about WHAT you did and WHAT the OUTCOMES were. Keep it to the point. Don’t be scarred to put humour in if you want to. I was quite flippant on my forms and they were both well received it turns out. Don’t be panicked when/if you get to stage two by the fellow candidate you chat to who, it turns out, has just returned from volunteer well digging in Rwanda after gaining a Masters in Aeronautics from Cambridge where he studied after becoming interested in aviation because his grandfather was a certain Mr. F. Whittle. You do not have to be a superman to get a BA CEP. In fact the ones I know are a really varied bunch. Certainly there is no distinct trait they are looking for. Indeed diversity in now taken as a desirable part of a selection procedure. If you end up with 100 people all the same then they’ll all be vulnerable to the same problems. Its a Darwin thing. Post your form off and you’ll get a little letter saying we’ve got it - please wait. I guesstimate that from now on about a third of applications forms will be progressed to Stage Two.
Stage Two takes a day and I think it is quite fun but a lot of people hate it and are apprehensive. This doesn’t help so try to be as cool as me if you can (shouldn’t be too tricky!). There are four things they will test you for. Verbal reasoning, Mathematical reasoning, Psychological profile and Flying Aptitude. About 20 people are tested in a day and you are usually split into two groups. This is all randomly done so don’t go reading anything into the fact you’ve been put into the ugly group! The Maths test is simple. 30 questions in 10 minutes - do as many as you can. I’ve never met anyone who has finished them. I passed both times by answering about 21 and guessing the rest. Of yes, no negative marking means that you can guess the questions you didn’t answer in the dying seconds and if you get it wrong it doesn’t matter. Wear a digital watch/stopclock to help you spend the last 30 seconds doing this. You are not supposed to finish all the questions as that would make the whole ranking exercise pointless! You can practice and get yourself to improve a little. Buy some books like ‘GCSE Maths Confuser’ or one of the many ‘Test Your Own IQ’ jobs from high street bookstores. Questions are a bit like ‘A plank of wood 120cm long is cut into 4 equal pieces. If the saw cuts 2mm of wood away how long would the pieces measure placed end to end’ Answer 3 times 2mm equals 6 mm take away from 1200mm equals 1194mm Answer B move on. Some are a bit harder and involve area and weight calculations and possibly speed/distance/time. You could definitely answer every question given enough time. Try to develop the skill of ‘eliminating the two obviously wrong answers’ as I call it (all questions are multiple choice). Another skill in doing multiple choice questions quickly is to only work out part of the sum. Like if 3412 needs to be multiplied by 3.8 then the answer must be something.6 if only one answer option ends .6 then don’t bother doing the whole sum like you had to in school just tick that answer and move on. Perhaps it might be a good idea to make sure you know your inches to feet to yards to metres to cm malarkey as that can throw you sometimes. You’ll need to know all that stuff if you get through anyway so its as well learnt now (think positive)!
The verbal reasoning test takes 40 minutes and you have to tick boxes having read a passage of text indicating whether something is False, might be False, not enough information, might be True, True. It gets a bit trickier when you have to Infer or Assume things. They give you a piece of text running along the lines of ‘Class A is taught by Bob. Class B is taught by Nigel. Class A get two grades higher on average at the end of the year than Class B on the same test. Bob is a better teacher than Nigel.’. You then get questions you must think about carefully. Can you infer that Bob is a better teacher than Nigel? Well yes you can because the last sentence makes that statement. If it didn’t then you’d have to say you couldn’t infer it because you don’t know the children are at the same school for example. It all gets rather tedious so just read and re-read the passage until you can make your best guess. One tip is to be careful to read the explanatory notes that open each section of the verbal test booklet. If, like me, you tend to get the gist and then skip onto the actual test then you can come unstuck. I’ve never heard of people running out of time so don’t panic too much and, of course, there is no negative marking so guess the last couple if you do run out of time. Verbal reasoning, unlike maths and co-ordination, is a very hard performance measure to improve through crash study/practice. There are books available from WHSmiths et al but I wouldn’t bother if I were you. I shall not say what the tests are and who writes them as they are commercially available and if everyone knew what they were the lovely people at Meadowbank would be forced to change them and we’d all be back in the dark.
The Psychological profile. Just do it. Don’t agonise over things or try to be clever. Trust me I’ve designed these things in my time and there are all kinds of clever Lie-scales built into them that will catch you out. They are only giving you the test to eliminate extremes. If you make sure you’re not a twitching hunchback living deep in the woods of Saffron Weldon with a huge collection of pine cones and a best friend call Invisible Ian you’ll not fail. However, they do use the profile to direct questioning later and perhaps to re-affirm something they thought in the group exercise (stage3). In general terms they want a nice quiet bank manager type who is quite sociable and reasonably confident. So, Yes you like parties but No you don’t always lead the conversation etc. etc. Don’t worry about what other people put because the scores are all weighted against sex, age etc. and thus you probably won’t get the same profiles from the same answers anyway.
The Micopat aptitude tests.
Designed by a Professor friend of mine (I wrote to him once) these are a battery of tests completed on a PC. Originally designed for the RAF these tests are extremely fair and accurate. No prior knowledge is required. Experience of the test helps only a tiny amount. Flying experience helps in some ways and hinders in others. All in all these tests are ‘a very good thing’ compared to some of the Mickey Mouse tests that feature in other selection processes I could mention. The instructions are simple and you get practice sessions and so it is difficult to make huge mistakes. The tests will measure you reaction times, recognition skills, hand-eye co-ordination, numerical reasoning and one or two other traits.
Personally I find the simple subtraction test unduly tricky. You have to do about 5 minutes of questions that run along the lines of 564 - 91 = 473 TRUE or FALSE. Clock ticking. Don’t panic! You get a series of these and you just have to decide true or false. The darts players amongst the group will be whistling through this part! Another test involves trying to land an aeroplane. Its NOTHING to do with the real thing so all those with PPL’s can stop looking smug at the back. Follow the instructions. I’ve worked out a very good way to do the test is to immediately dive hard and turn left. Loose most of the height and then level out still going at full speed. As you approach the aiming point slow right down in one go. As soon as speed stabilises dive the last 50 feet to the target. Sounds tricky until you see it and then it’ll all make sense. Trust me. The test is trying to see if you can monitor two things at once (speed and height). You make it easy by dealing with 95 percent of the height first and then focusing totally on the speed. Much easier and worked a treat with me every time. Mind you my realworld landings are appalling by comparison!
There is a whole big section on ‘keeping the cross in the box’. This is an updated version of the old black and white brylcreamed films you used to see of WW2 pilot selection where Harry and Graham battled furiously to try to keep a spot in the middle of a screen. Dead simple really. If you are a cack handed, can’t catch a ball for toffee wetpants type that goes to pieces easily under pressure then you’ll find it difficult. No pressure. The only tips I can give you are to hold the joystick at the base of the stem (ooh er!) rather than at the top. The device is so lightly sprung and has such a wide arc of travel that you can get a more natural ‘feel’ by holding the thing very low down. Make sure you are comfy before you start the tests as you are locked into them like grim death for several minutes. You can if you wish do the following. Take ages to read the instructions and let the chap or chapess in the cubicle next to you start the test. You can then sit back and watch how they get on with things. You can always see either the person to your left or right. It doesn’t really give you an advantage and you can’t ‘copy’ them but you might see a common error and it might make you feel a bit better about your own performance. The risk of course is that you end up watching Chuck Yeager Jr max everything in sight and you end up sobbing back the tears at your pathetic efforts. You pays your money....
It seems normal that the results for Stage 2 come through in a couple of weeks and you get a date for Stage3. Stage2 is actually a big hurdle. It seems that the BA pass marks are actually higher than the RAF and many who have waltzed through Cranwell doors have come away crestfallen from the BA CEP tests. I have heard figures of 25 percent get past the tests. That might be a little pessimistic from now on but its definitely in the ballpark. So Stage3 then, this is where you really have to pull out all the stops. There are eleven criteria that they mark you on during the Stage3 day. If you get eleven ticks you get though, ten, and you fail...
What can you do to prepare? Well its almost without limits but I would recommend at least the following. Download and read the entire BA website several times. Request a copy of the BA Annual Report available from Comet House. Go to a cuttings agency or decent web search and find all the press comment involving BA in the past 6 months. Use PPRuNe to get the most up to date info or ask a specific question and don’t forget the archive function. Often posting a simple request on Wannabes will get you no-where as you are in competition with half the readers, half the readers are bored rigid by BA CEP stuff and another half (Welsh maths come in here) would like to know the answers to your questions as well. You can’t really go swanning onto Rumours where the actual BA pilots hang out so what can you do? Well try reading everybody’s profiles and noting who is a BA pilot. Try following peoples threads for a while and in a few weeks you soon work out who probably works for who. You can then approach (very, very politely) one or two likely candidates by Email with perhaps one simple question which will be easy for them to answer. Then you get a dialogue going and (its a bit like fishing really) bit by bit you can cultivate some fantastic contacts who in a short few minutes can give you goldust inside info. I’ve done this and have passed the Pilot interview which focuses on BA Ops with confidence and ease. There is no excuse for being unprepared and I estimate at least 20 hours is needed to do it properly.
The actual day runs like this. One interview with a pilot, one with a person from Human Resources, a written exercise and a group exercise. Often the day is finished for you by mid afternoon. Make a big effort to break the ice and speak to your fellow candidates (there is usually six of you). Getting a good spirit going helps you get feedback throughout the day on what they’ve just done and what’s involved. It also helps in the Group Exercise at the end of the day because you know everyone’s first name and you feel less awkward. Plus you’ll find they are nice people. And you’re almost guaranteed to come across a fellow PPRuNer - how is it that everyone always guesses who I am even with such a cunning disguise???
The Written Exercise. Seems to be fairly certain to be along the lines of “You are a new BA line pilot. As part of the Chairman’s programme to save a Billion quid in operating costs write a memo to him explaining what you can do to help. Write with regard to your skills, attitudes and behaviour”. You get 20 minutes to prepare a draft and then a further 20 minutes to write a good copy. Put everything you can possibly think of into the plan, it doesn’t matter if you never use it. Obvious themes are customer service so talk about flightdeck visits, PA speeches, looking clean and smart around the terminal etc. Don’t get clever with making commercial turns or routing direct if you understand that stuff as BA are SOP-city. Mentioning not having an accident might be good. Also being flexible about working patterns and being a good team manager/player with the Cabin Crew comes in handy. Don’t bend over backwards mind because the pilots will read this and they don’t want some management lapdog wimp in the club! When writing the memo treat it like a memo and put in all the To: From: cc: business and follow proper Memo structure and style. Doing this at least shows you know about these things.
The Pilot Interview. Here’s where your prior research pays off. You’ll be grilled about BA operations, history, routes, aircraft, technical issues etc. etc. Any flying experience you have will be probed and as these guys are pretty switched on I suggest you avoid any hint of bluffing. Remember that the Pilot is NOT BA management. He/She is not going to want to hire some snivelling type who will grovel to management’s every whim. They are assessing you for lifelong entry to their private flying club. They will want you to stand four square with them against management exploitation etc. They are also looking for someone they could spend 10 hours in a cockpit with who won’t annoy them, will buy them a beer in the hotel and will laugh at their jokes. Try to have a vision of where you want to be in BA in ten or twenty years time. If you get the job it is for life and you will end up a Skipper and possibly all kinds of things besides like Training Captain, Union Rep or Chief Pilot. Its always nice in an interview to see that the candidate has thought further than the first years salary and aiming for the stars is no bad thing in the young and the talented. I would avoid playing any ‘actually my father flies Concorde’ cards if I were you. The Pilots are rather meritocratic in bearing in my experience and anything that smacks of insiderism isn’t going to help you. Remember that the Pilot interviewer does not do this for a living. He or she will only have attended a short course on selection. Try to help them out by talking expansively and openly. They may be nervous about the interview as well as you. If you leave having talked your jaw off and smiling a lot then that makes he or she feel that they’ve run a good interview. Remember to say thanks for such an interesting chat or mention that you’ve enjoyed the interview. The usual suspects will turn up during the interview so make sure you have an answer prepared. You can expect 'So why BA in particular?', 'Why do want to be a pilot?', 'When did you first become interested in flying', 'What is your best/worst quality?', 'How would your friends/workmates describe you?', 'What will you do if you are rejected?', 'Tell me about the training should you be successful?', 'Where would you like to be based or like to fly and why?', 'What is the most exciting part of the job in your opinion?', 'Tell me about a time when you were wrong and had to back down?', 'What would you do if your Captain came down for a drink in the bar wearing a dress?' (ANSWER - buy her a drink of course!) 'What would you do if the Captain made a heavy landing and you thought it unsafe to takeoff again but he insisted it will be OK?', 'What will be the greatest advance in aircraft technology in the next 25 years?', 'How does a wing/jet-engine/radar work?'. If you don’t know an answer then say so rather than bluff and fumble. Its always impressive if you turn it around and say 'I don’t know but I’ve often wondered why that was - can you explain it to me?'. Try to think of an intelligent question to ask at the end of the interview when you are asked. If you can think of something really original then all the better as you’ll stick in their minds. Try to avoid asking things which can be found elsewhere like how long the training lasts etc.
The Human Resources interview. Objectives here are a little different. They want to know whether you will be a good employee like a standard unit of production. Have you got any dodgy views, are you a hard working honest type, are you a rabble rousing militant industrial agitator or will you buckle down to the job and not even dare look management in the eye. Well, that type of thing. To this end you will be probed on family background, school years, hobbies interests and pastimes, views on social issues/current events. Career plans in general, what you like about your present job what you don’t like. What you are like as a person. They tend to use the application form quite a bit here so make sure you know exactly what you wrote and be prepared to expand upon it. You will be asked to think of new examples of how you did something like gave full consideration to someone feeling vulnerable or how you acted in a socially difficult situation. I find this hard because life (for me) isn’t like some soap opera where I’m constantly having to sack my best friend from the Company whilst explaining that the reason Rachel is leaving him is because, frankly, I’m better in bed. This is an area where you can exaggerate a little or adapt what happened to someone else and you are still on fairly safe ground. The flip side is you will be probed on your ‘dark side’. What would you like to do better, what are you bad at doing, what are you two worst weaknesses etc. etc. Although I hate doing it as its a cliché I can think of nothing better than trotting out the 'I push myself to hard and expect the same from others' and 'I am overly competitive and hate losing'. A bit trite but you are on fairly safe ground as you wouldn’t be sat in that room if you weren’t a hard working and competitive person. Another thing I’ve noticed is that whilst the Pilot interview is held in reverence by candidates some have a lesser opinion of the HR interview. Big mistake. The HR person can fail you just as easily as anyone else and they will be good at picking up negative vibes from you - hey you think HR people are popular in work?!? Be very polite and courteous just like you would with the Pilot interview. Also a good idea to know exactly how old your parents are (er, I look stoopid) plus little things like what year you took your GCSE’s in as they love asking 'So you took your GCSE’s in 1993, yes?' and you go 'Yep!' only to realise later that it was 1992. Again an intelligent question at the end is worth its wait in gold. Try something along the lines of 'Apart from flying training what other training would I receive in the early years of my careers?', or 'Are the industrial relations problems featured in the press recently now completely resolved?'. Pick something a HR type is going to hold dear. You’ll probably get asked 'Is there anything we haven’t covered that I should know about?' - always nice if you can pull a little feature out of your hat at this point like 'Oh well I do play in a band and we have just entered the charts at number 6 with our debut single, but I just do it for fun.' Both interviews last approx. 40 minutes.
Group Exercise. This is the tricky one which I certainly failed first time and I suspect was the problem second time around. The problem is that its a ‘black magic’ assessment. There is nothing you can do to prepare, you are reliant upon your fellow candidates and in the end the decision is purely subjective on their part. They are looking for someone who participates but does not dominate in essence. Whilst at RAF OASC they are looking for the natural leader of men type who bends all present to his iron will, in the civilian world they need team playing people, who don’t get peoples backs up and who share workload and information. Make sure you listen to everybody’s point of view and don’t be shy of asking them what they think. Make sure you say at least something though during the half hour exercise. You will be sat around a table with a load of lego type equipment. Your brief will be to build something as a group that is functional but aesthetically pleasing to the judges who are sat in the corners of the room furiously scribbling about you. You have five minutes to play with the pieces, ten minutes to cobble together a plan, 5 minutes to build in silence and a further ten minutes in which time to complete the building and you can talk. The timings are approximations from memory. Always a good idea to appoint a timekeeper with a stopwatch. Typical things that get built are trains, lorries, ATC towers, bridges, oil rigs, steam trains etc. etc. Don’t worry about what it is. The affair turns into the most democratic, long winded, pussy footing about, six intelligent people acting their little hearts out thing you can ever imagine. Do all the good things like maintain eye contact, know everyone’s first name, don't snatch all the red pieces and refuse to hand them over unless everyone calls you Sir - that kind of thing. Although the situation is comical and there is plenty of room for humour I caution against it. They take this exercise very seriously indeed. Treat it like life and death. Trust me.
At the end of this group session you stay in the same room and everyone is there and you have a chat about what happens next. They show a wonderful little video and you get to ask questions. Again I suspect they get bored rigid with predictable ones like 'What if I fail the training?', 'What A/c will I fly to start with?', 'When does the next course start?', 'How many people are you looking to recruit?' etc. etc. If you can be original, inspired and witty then this is the time as in only half an hour you will have left Meadowbank whilst they will be deciding whether you’re in or out of BA.
I think its a splendid idea for you all to have a pint or nine in the pub just down the road when you’ve finished and agonise over one anothers interviews. You then wait about a fortnight for a letter starting either, ‘We are delighted’ or ‘It is with regret’. If you do win the golden ticket be sure not to tell the boss where to stuff it or drop out of Uni until you’ve passed the BA medical which is tougher then the CAA Class1. Courses are currently running in Oxford and West Michigan. Both are excellent, the training is superb and you have a rewarding and stable job for life, pass go, collect flipping great wodges of cash and perfect the art of ordering a pink gin in fifteen languages!
A word on numbers. The most oft repeated figures I have heard run something along the lines of twenty trillion phone calls resulting in about 60 percent of forms sent out being returned. Of the forms returned about a third are called for Aptitude testing. 25 percent pass the aptitude testing and go to final stage interviews. At the final stage 1 to 1.5 persons on the day of 6 will get through to the Golden Ticket. These numbers and variations on them are pretty meaningless as at all stages you are measured against a standard and not in competition with others on the day hence you could all fail or all get through. I’m sure the figures vary and with the current lower profile advertising and continued refinement of the recruitment process the numbers of people passing the various stages will rise. If you get through then well done you are in some fantastically talented company. If you don’t then you are also in fantastically talented company (myself not withstanding) so don’t take it too hard. If you are as determined as you think you are then indeed there is a flightdeck out there with your name on it somewhere - you’ve just got to find it. Best of luck. WWW
[This message has been edited by Wee Weasley Welshman (edited 12 February 1999).]
General - The BA CEP used to ‘open’ for a few weeks and then close. Only when it was open could you get an application form. This is no longer the case and the scheme seems to be open indefinitely. The telephone number for an application form has changed once or twice so just call BA Customer Services or Directory Enquiries. BA are easily going to need over 100 Cadets each year for the next couple of years. This means you may well be able to apply for a second or third time. The upper age limit is now 26. Be warned that should you fail you have to wait for a year before re-applying. The CEP scheme is administered through BA’s Meadowbank site in Hounslow near Heathrow. This is where testing takes place. You can call Meadowbank and ask to speak to a recruitment advisor. Don’t do this as a matter of course or you will really swamp them. However you may be able to find out where you are in the process, current waiting times and so forth. You may also be able to gain feedback from them should you fail the last stage (not the aptitudes or application form). Try writing as its more polite and easier for them to deal with. They can de-brief you over the telephone usually. Talking of stages there are three really. Stage One is the application form. Stage Two is the Aptitude testing day at Meadowbank. Stage Three is interviews. Pass stage three and subject to a medical you’re in. It takes some people months and months to pass these stages. I last did the whole lot in less a month. Things vary and don’t read too much into it. You can claim petrol allowances for travel to Meadowbank but accommodation is no longer covered I believe. Claim forms are available from the reception desk of Meadowbank. You can always park on a sidestreet a block or two away from Meadowbank.
OK lets talk about the application form. To get the form you will have to answer a few screening questions over the telephone. A few days later an application form should arrive through the post. It is huge and will take you many hours to complete. Make some photocopies and practice filling it out. Keep a copy of the form as you sent it in - its really embarrassing trying to remember your slightly overstated claims to fame at an interview 6 months later! Don’t worry about flying experience too much. They’ve happily taken people with no hours at all through to people with 200 and a few ratings. The main body of the form are four questions requiring essay style answers of about a page. Liable to change slightly they run along the lines of 'Show a time when you displayed good team working and leadership skills', 'Show a time when you worked under pressure or had to change your plan', 'Show how you are dedicated and hard working', 'Show how you are determined to succeed and why you want to be a BA Pilot'. That kind of thing.
So how do we go about answering this then. Well make sure you do at least three drafts and do get someone else to read through your answer before you write it up. Its often tricky to spot your own poor structure etc. Try to think of different aspects of your life to draw the examples from. It can be very easy to, say, draw on your time in the Air Training Corps solely to answer the questions. This gets tedious for the reader and you want to be projecting the old ‘well rounded character’ image. You’ll end up with the usual suspects of schools, sport, University societies etc. You don’t have to be Mr Original because 99 percent of people must write about the same sort of thing. However, you can write about similar things in a better way if you make the effort. Always bear in mind the notes they give you of writing about WHAT you did and WHAT the OUTCOMES were. Keep it to the point. Don’t be scarred to put humour in if you want to. I was quite flippant on my forms and they were both well received it turns out. Don’t be panicked when/if you get to stage two by the fellow candidate you chat to who, it turns out, has just returned from volunteer well digging in Rwanda after gaining a Masters in Aeronautics from Cambridge where he studied after becoming interested in aviation because his grandfather was a certain Mr. F. Whittle. You do not have to be a superman to get a BA CEP. In fact the ones I know are a really varied bunch. Certainly there is no distinct trait they are looking for. Indeed diversity in now taken as a desirable part of a selection procedure. If you end up with 100 people all the same then they’ll all be vulnerable to the same problems. Its a Darwin thing. Post your form off and you’ll get a little letter saying we’ve got it - please wait. I guesstimate that from now on about a third of applications forms will be progressed to Stage Two.
Stage Two takes a day and I think it is quite fun but a lot of people hate it and are apprehensive. This doesn’t help so try to be as cool as me if you can (shouldn’t be too tricky!). There are four things they will test you for. Verbal reasoning, Mathematical reasoning, Psychological profile and Flying Aptitude. About 20 people are tested in a day and you are usually split into two groups. This is all randomly done so don’t go reading anything into the fact you’ve been put into the ugly group! The Maths test is simple. 30 questions in 10 minutes - do as many as you can. I’ve never met anyone who has finished them. I passed both times by answering about 21 and guessing the rest. Of yes, no negative marking means that you can guess the questions you didn’t answer in the dying seconds and if you get it wrong it doesn’t matter. Wear a digital watch/stopclock to help you spend the last 30 seconds doing this. You are not supposed to finish all the questions as that would make the whole ranking exercise pointless! You can practice and get yourself to improve a little. Buy some books like ‘GCSE Maths Confuser’ or one of the many ‘Test Your Own IQ’ jobs from high street bookstores. Questions are a bit like ‘A plank of wood 120cm long is cut into 4 equal pieces. If the saw cuts 2mm of wood away how long would the pieces measure placed end to end’ Answer 3 times 2mm equals 6 mm take away from 1200mm equals 1194mm Answer B move on. Some are a bit harder and involve area and weight calculations and possibly speed/distance/time. You could definitely answer every question given enough time. Try to develop the skill of ‘eliminating the two obviously wrong answers’ as I call it (all questions are multiple choice). Another skill in doing multiple choice questions quickly is to only work out part of the sum. Like if 3412 needs to be multiplied by 3.8 then the answer must be something.6 if only one answer option ends .6 then don’t bother doing the whole sum like you had to in school just tick that answer and move on. Perhaps it might be a good idea to make sure you know your inches to feet to yards to metres to cm malarkey as that can throw you sometimes. You’ll need to know all that stuff if you get through anyway so its as well learnt now (think positive)!
The verbal reasoning test takes 40 minutes and you have to tick boxes having read a passage of text indicating whether something is False, might be False, not enough information, might be True, True. It gets a bit trickier when you have to Infer or Assume things. They give you a piece of text running along the lines of ‘Class A is taught by Bob. Class B is taught by Nigel. Class A get two grades higher on average at the end of the year than Class B on the same test. Bob is a better teacher than Nigel.’. You then get questions you must think about carefully. Can you infer that Bob is a better teacher than Nigel? Well yes you can because the last sentence makes that statement. If it didn’t then you’d have to say you couldn’t infer it because you don’t know the children are at the same school for example. It all gets rather tedious so just read and re-read the passage until you can make your best guess. One tip is to be careful to read the explanatory notes that open each section of the verbal test booklet. If, like me, you tend to get the gist and then skip onto the actual test then you can come unstuck. I’ve never heard of people running out of time so don’t panic too much and, of course, there is no negative marking so guess the last couple if you do run out of time. Verbal reasoning, unlike maths and co-ordination, is a very hard performance measure to improve through crash study/practice. There are books available from WHSmiths et al but I wouldn’t bother if I were you. I shall not say what the tests are and who writes them as they are commercially available and if everyone knew what they were the lovely people at Meadowbank would be forced to change them and we’d all be back in the dark.
The Psychological profile. Just do it. Don’t agonise over things or try to be clever. Trust me I’ve designed these things in my time and there are all kinds of clever Lie-scales built into them that will catch you out. They are only giving you the test to eliminate extremes. If you make sure you’re not a twitching hunchback living deep in the woods of Saffron Weldon with a huge collection of pine cones and a best friend call Invisible Ian you’ll not fail. However, they do use the profile to direct questioning later and perhaps to re-affirm something they thought in the group exercise (stage3). In general terms they want a nice quiet bank manager type who is quite sociable and reasonably confident. So, Yes you like parties but No you don’t always lead the conversation etc. etc. Don’t worry about what other people put because the scores are all weighted against sex, age etc. and thus you probably won’t get the same profiles from the same answers anyway.
The Micopat aptitude tests.
Designed by a Professor friend of mine (I wrote to him once) these are a battery of tests completed on a PC. Originally designed for the RAF these tests are extremely fair and accurate. No prior knowledge is required. Experience of the test helps only a tiny amount. Flying experience helps in some ways and hinders in others. All in all these tests are ‘a very good thing’ compared to some of the Mickey Mouse tests that feature in other selection processes I could mention. The instructions are simple and you get practice sessions and so it is difficult to make huge mistakes. The tests will measure you reaction times, recognition skills, hand-eye co-ordination, numerical reasoning and one or two other traits.
Personally I find the simple subtraction test unduly tricky. You have to do about 5 minutes of questions that run along the lines of 564 - 91 = 473 TRUE or FALSE. Clock ticking. Don’t panic! You get a series of these and you just have to decide true or false. The darts players amongst the group will be whistling through this part! Another test involves trying to land an aeroplane. Its NOTHING to do with the real thing so all those with PPL’s can stop looking smug at the back. Follow the instructions. I’ve worked out a very good way to do the test is to immediately dive hard and turn left. Loose most of the height and then level out still going at full speed. As you approach the aiming point slow right down in one go. As soon as speed stabilises dive the last 50 feet to the target. Sounds tricky until you see it and then it’ll all make sense. Trust me. The test is trying to see if you can monitor two things at once (speed and height). You make it easy by dealing with 95 percent of the height first and then focusing totally on the speed. Much easier and worked a treat with me every time. Mind you my realworld landings are appalling by comparison!
There is a whole big section on ‘keeping the cross in the box’. This is an updated version of the old black and white brylcreamed films you used to see of WW2 pilot selection where Harry and Graham battled furiously to try to keep a spot in the middle of a screen. Dead simple really. If you are a cack handed, can’t catch a ball for toffee wetpants type that goes to pieces easily under pressure then you’ll find it difficult. No pressure. The only tips I can give you are to hold the joystick at the base of the stem (ooh er!) rather than at the top. The device is so lightly sprung and has such a wide arc of travel that you can get a more natural ‘feel’ by holding the thing very low down. Make sure you are comfy before you start the tests as you are locked into them like grim death for several minutes. You can if you wish do the following. Take ages to read the instructions and let the chap or chapess in the cubicle next to you start the test. You can then sit back and watch how they get on with things. You can always see either the person to your left or right. It doesn’t really give you an advantage and you can’t ‘copy’ them but you might see a common error and it might make you feel a bit better about your own performance. The risk of course is that you end up watching Chuck Yeager Jr max everything in sight and you end up sobbing back the tears at your pathetic efforts. You pays your money....
It seems normal that the results for Stage 2 come through in a couple of weeks and you get a date for Stage3. Stage2 is actually a big hurdle. It seems that the BA pass marks are actually higher than the RAF and many who have waltzed through Cranwell doors have come away crestfallen from the BA CEP tests. I have heard figures of 25 percent get past the tests. That might be a little pessimistic from now on but its definitely in the ballpark. So Stage3 then, this is where you really have to pull out all the stops. There are eleven criteria that they mark you on during the Stage3 day. If you get eleven ticks you get though, ten, and you fail...
What can you do to prepare? Well its almost without limits but I would recommend at least the following. Download and read the entire BA website several times. Request a copy of the BA Annual Report available from Comet House. Go to a cuttings agency or decent web search and find all the press comment involving BA in the past 6 months. Use PPRuNe to get the most up to date info or ask a specific question and don’t forget the archive function. Often posting a simple request on Wannabes will get you no-where as you are in competition with half the readers, half the readers are bored rigid by BA CEP stuff and another half (Welsh maths come in here) would like to know the answers to your questions as well. You can’t really go swanning onto Rumours where the actual BA pilots hang out so what can you do? Well try reading everybody’s profiles and noting who is a BA pilot. Try following peoples threads for a while and in a few weeks you soon work out who probably works for who. You can then approach (very, very politely) one or two likely candidates by Email with perhaps one simple question which will be easy for them to answer. Then you get a dialogue going and (its a bit like fishing really) bit by bit you can cultivate some fantastic contacts who in a short few minutes can give you goldust inside info. I’ve done this and have passed the Pilot interview which focuses on BA Ops with confidence and ease. There is no excuse for being unprepared and I estimate at least 20 hours is needed to do it properly.
The actual day runs like this. One interview with a pilot, one with a person from Human Resources, a written exercise and a group exercise. Often the day is finished for you by mid afternoon. Make a big effort to break the ice and speak to your fellow candidates (there is usually six of you). Getting a good spirit going helps you get feedback throughout the day on what they’ve just done and what’s involved. It also helps in the Group Exercise at the end of the day because you know everyone’s first name and you feel less awkward. Plus you’ll find they are nice people. And you’re almost guaranteed to come across a fellow PPRuNer - how is it that everyone always guesses who I am even with such a cunning disguise???
The Written Exercise. Seems to be fairly certain to be along the lines of “You are a new BA line pilot. As part of the Chairman’s programme to save a Billion quid in operating costs write a memo to him explaining what you can do to help. Write with regard to your skills, attitudes and behaviour”. You get 20 minutes to prepare a draft and then a further 20 minutes to write a good copy. Put everything you can possibly think of into the plan, it doesn’t matter if you never use it. Obvious themes are customer service so talk about flightdeck visits, PA speeches, looking clean and smart around the terminal etc. Don’t get clever with making commercial turns or routing direct if you understand that stuff as BA are SOP-city. Mentioning not having an accident might be good. Also being flexible about working patterns and being a good team manager/player with the Cabin Crew comes in handy. Don’t bend over backwards mind because the pilots will read this and they don’t want some management lapdog wimp in the club! When writing the memo treat it like a memo and put in all the To: From: cc: business and follow proper Memo structure and style. Doing this at least shows you know about these things.
The Pilot Interview. Here’s where your prior research pays off. You’ll be grilled about BA operations, history, routes, aircraft, technical issues etc. etc. Any flying experience you have will be probed and as these guys are pretty switched on I suggest you avoid any hint of bluffing. Remember that the Pilot is NOT BA management. He/She is not going to want to hire some snivelling type who will grovel to management’s every whim. They are assessing you for lifelong entry to their private flying club. They will want you to stand four square with them against management exploitation etc. They are also looking for someone they could spend 10 hours in a cockpit with who won’t annoy them, will buy them a beer in the hotel and will laugh at their jokes. Try to have a vision of where you want to be in BA in ten or twenty years time. If you get the job it is for life and you will end up a Skipper and possibly all kinds of things besides like Training Captain, Union Rep or Chief Pilot. Its always nice in an interview to see that the candidate has thought further than the first years salary and aiming for the stars is no bad thing in the young and the talented. I would avoid playing any ‘actually my father flies Concorde’ cards if I were you. The Pilots are rather meritocratic in bearing in my experience and anything that smacks of insiderism isn’t going to help you. Remember that the Pilot interviewer does not do this for a living. He or she will only have attended a short course on selection. Try to help them out by talking expansively and openly. They may be nervous about the interview as well as you. If you leave having talked your jaw off and smiling a lot then that makes he or she feel that they’ve run a good interview. Remember to say thanks for such an interesting chat or mention that you’ve enjoyed the interview. The usual suspects will turn up during the interview so make sure you have an answer prepared. You can expect 'So why BA in particular?', 'Why do want to be a pilot?', 'When did you first become interested in flying', 'What is your best/worst quality?', 'How would your friends/workmates describe you?', 'What will you do if you are rejected?', 'Tell me about the training should you be successful?', 'Where would you like to be based or like to fly and why?', 'What is the most exciting part of the job in your opinion?', 'Tell me about a time when you were wrong and had to back down?', 'What would you do if your Captain came down for a drink in the bar wearing a dress?' (ANSWER - buy her a drink of course!) 'What would you do if the Captain made a heavy landing and you thought it unsafe to takeoff again but he insisted it will be OK?', 'What will be the greatest advance in aircraft technology in the next 25 years?', 'How does a wing/jet-engine/radar work?'. If you don’t know an answer then say so rather than bluff and fumble. Its always impressive if you turn it around and say 'I don’t know but I’ve often wondered why that was - can you explain it to me?'. Try to think of an intelligent question to ask at the end of the interview when you are asked. If you can think of something really original then all the better as you’ll stick in their minds. Try to avoid asking things which can be found elsewhere like how long the training lasts etc.
The Human Resources interview. Objectives here are a little different. They want to know whether you will be a good employee like a standard unit of production. Have you got any dodgy views, are you a hard working honest type, are you a rabble rousing militant industrial agitator or will you buckle down to the job and not even dare look management in the eye. Well, that type of thing. To this end you will be probed on family background, school years, hobbies interests and pastimes, views on social issues/current events. Career plans in general, what you like about your present job what you don’t like. What you are like as a person. They tend to use the application form quite a bit here so make sure you know exactly what you wrote and be prepared to expand upon it. You will be asked to think of new examples of how you did something like gave full consideration to someone feeling vulnerable or how you acted in a socially difficult situation. I find this hard because life (for me) isn’t like some soap opera where I’m constantly having to sack my best friend from the Company whilst explaining that the reason Rachel is leaving him is because, frankly, I’m better in bed. This is an area where you can exaggerate a little or adapt what happened to someone else and you are still on fairly safe ground. The flip side is you will be probed on your ‘dark side’. What would you like to do better, what are you bad at doing, what are you two worst weaknesses etc. etc. Although I hate doing it as its a cliché I can think of nothing better than trotting out the 'I push myself to hard and expect the same from others' and 'I am overly competitive and hate losing'. A bit trite but you are on fairly safe ground as you wouldn’t be sat in that room if you weren’t a hard working and competitive person. Another thing I’ve noticed is that whilst the Pilot interview is held in reverence by candidates some have a lesser opinion of the HR interview. Big mistake. The HR person can fail you just as easily as anyone else and they will be good at picking up negative vibes from you - hey you think HR people are popular in work?!? Be very polite and courteous just like you would with the Pilot interview. Also a good idea to know exactly how old your parents are (er, I look stoopid) plus little things like what year you took your GCSE’s in as they love asking 'So you took your GCSE’s in 1993, yes?' and you go 'Yep!' only to realise later that it was 1992. Again an intelligent question at the end is worth its wait in gold. Try something along the lines of 'Apart from flying training what other training would I receive in the early years of my careers?', or 'Are the industrial relations problems featured in the press recently now completely resolved?'. Pick something a HR type is going to hold dear. You’ll probably get asked 'Is there anything we haven’t covered that I should know about?' - always nice if you can pull a little feature out of your hat at this point like 'Oh well I do play in a band and we have just entered the charts at number 6 with our debut single, but I just do it for fun.' Both interviews last approx. 40 minutes.
Group Exercise. This is the tricky one which I certainly failed first time and I suspect was the problem second time around. The problem is that its a ‘black magic’ assessment. There is nothing you can do to prepare, you are reliant upon your fellow candidates and in the end the decision is purely subjective on their part. They are looking for someone who participates but does not dominate in essence. Whilst at RAF OASC they are looking for the natural leader of men type who bends all present to his iron will, in the civilian world they need team playing people, who don’t get peoples backs up and who share workload and information. Make sure you listen to everybody’s point of view and don’t be shy of asking them what they think. Make sure you say at least something though during the half hour exercise. You will be sat around a table with a load of lego type equipment. Your brief will be to build something as a group that is functional but aesthetically pleasing to the judges who are sat in the corners of the room furiously scribbling about you. You have five minutes to play with the pieces, ten minutes to cobble together a plan, 5 minutes to build in silence and a further ten minutes in which time to complete the building and you can talk. The timings are approximations from memory. Always a good idea to appoint a timekeeper with a stopwatch. Typical things that get built are trains, lorries, ATC towers, bridges, oil rigs, steam trains etc. etc. Don’t worry about what it is. The affair turns into the most democratic, long winded, pussy footing about, six intelligent people acting their little hearts out thing you can ever imagine. Do all the good things like maintain eye contact, know everyone’s first name, don't snatch all the red pieces and refuse to hand them over unless everyone calls you Sir - that kind of thing. Although the situation is comical and there is plenty of room for humour I caution against it. They take this exercise very seriously indeed. Treat it like life and death. Trust me.
At the end of this group session you stay in the same room and everyone is there and you have a chat about what happens next. They show a wonderful little video and you get to ask questions. Again I suspect they get bored rigid with predictable ones like 'What if I fail the training?', 'What A/c will I fly to start with?', 'When does the next course start?', 'How many people are you looking to recruit?' etc. etc. If you can be original, inspired and witty then this is the time as in only half an hour you will have left Meadowbank whilst they will be deciding whether you’re in or out of BA.
I think its a splendid idea for you all to have a pint or nine in the pub just down the road when you’ve finished and agonise over one anothers interviews. You then wait about a fortnight for a letter starting either, ‘We are delighted’ or ‘It is with regret’. If you do win the golden ticket be sure not to tell the boss where to stuff it or drop out of Uni until you’ve passed the BA medical which is tougher then the CAA Class1. Courses are currently running in Oxford and West Michigan. Both are excellent, the training is superb and you have a rewarding and stable job for life, pass go, collect flipping great wodges of cash and perfect the art of ordering a pink gin in fifteen languages!
A word on numbers. The most oft repeated figures I have heard run something along the lines of twenty trillion phone calls resulting in about 60 percent of forms sent out being returned. Of the forms returned about a third are called for Aptitude testing. 25 percent pass the aptitude testing and go to final stage interviews. At the final stage 1 to 1.5 persons on the day of 6 will get through to the Golden Ticket. These numbers and variations on them are pretty meaningless as at all stages you are measured against a standard and not in competition with others on the day hence you could all fail or all get through. I’m sure the figures vary and with the current lower profile advertising and continued refinement of the recruitment process the numbers of people passing the various stages will rise. If you get through then well done you are in some fantastically talented company. If you don’t then you are also in fantastically talented company (myself not withstanding) so don’t take it too hard. If you are as determined as you think you are then indeed there is a flightdeck out there with your name on it somewhere - you’ve just got to find it. Best of luck. WWW
[This message has been edited by Wee Weasley Welshman (edited 12 February 1999).]
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WWW - Great post.
Of course, now the definative cat is out of the bag, they (BA) will have to change their whole interview procedure !
LOL LOL LOL LOL - right now I'll bet they just love you down at Cranebank - they should have given you the job on the proviso that you keep schtum.
Of course, now the definative cat is out of the bag, they (BA) will have to change their whole interview procedure !
LOL LOL LOL LOL - right now I'll bet they just love you down at Cranebank - they should have given you the job on the proviso that you keep schtum.
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Great post...just one thing did'nt you fail the procedure??.....just a word of warning to everyone.
Have you ever checked out WMU???...just wondering
Also cash drive is right about something for once in his life.bet your life the format will now be changed
Have you ever checked out WMU???...just wondering
Also cash drive is right about something for once in his life.bet your life the format will now be changed
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Indeed I failed to score on both attempts. However, feedback shows the Group Exercise to be the problem whilst the rest of it was passed hence I feel confident to comment. I'd heard WMU was great - new info always welcome. I doubt the training is that rubbish compared to the string and sticking plasters course I am having to cobble together! Trade you my scruffy PA-38 and a portakabin for your 509 course!!!
I hope they don't change the format at MBank. There would be little point as it still works and anything new can very quickly be posted here. Other recruitment programmes suffer because of the net. You just have to adapt to it - the problem isn't going to go away is it? WWW
I hope they don't change the format at MBank. There would be little point as it still works and anything new can very quickly be posted here. Other recruitment programmes suffer because of the net. You just have to adapt to it - the problem isn't going to go away is it? WWW
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I got through to the final assessment with the help of WWW's original draft, read it, he speaks the truth and you'll owe him thanks. I failed, but I'm having another crack as we speak.
I have heard from a pretty reliable source that the team work section has changed. It is now a discussion based role play type affair. They give you all the details on the day obviously, and are looking for all the same attributes as before, but it is probably a little easier without the stickle bricks! Incidently, that is where I fell down too, not that it's any consolation.
If anyone else has gone through the final stage recently, can you let me know the rough wording of the written question. Forwarned is forarmed.
Best of luck to everyone, and remember the only thing you're competing against is the criteria BA have set!
I have heard from a pretty reliable source that the team work section has changed. It is now a discussion based role play type affair. They give you all the details on the day obviously, and are looking for all the same attributes as before, but it is probably a little easier without the stickle bricks! Incidently, that is where I fell down too, not that it's any consolation.
If anyone else has gone through the final stage recently, can you let me know the rough wording of the written question. Forwarned is forarmed.
Best of luck to everyone, and remember the only thing you're competing against is the criteria BA have set!
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Be interesting if they do get rid of the lego, a group discussion would be more representative of the type of CRM skills necessary in the flight deck IMHO.
I shouldn't think the format will change, Meadowbank have known about PPRuNe for a long time and all this information is here already (less of course WWW charming anecdotes
).
I'm aware that BA's eyesight requirements exceed the CAA Class1 standard but I'm not sure about the other bits.
I shouldn't think the format will change, Meadowbank have known about PPRuNe for a long time and all this information is here already (less of course WWW charming anecdotes
).I'm aware that BA's eyesight requirements exceed the CAA Class1 standard but I'm not sure about the other bits.
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It was stickle bricks 4 weeks ago. A group discussion as per Cranwell OASC would be much better I think. The verbal channel is by far the dominant one in the cockpit and thus of greatest importance to CRM training. It also becomes crystal clear who just goes with the flow, who just will not back down or accomodate another view and who maintains a coherent train of thought. CRP5 - I'm cool, you'd have to burn the Welsh flag whilst purchasing a holiday cottage to get my back up 
WWW
WWW