PR Interview Time!

Congratulations! You got the email confirming that you have progressed to your Pr Interview! Hopefully, your presentation is already prepared and just needs a little polish... but on the off chance that you haven't prepared it yet, here are my top 10 tips for Pr Interviews:

1. Test your setup first - camera; light; sound; background, ability to hold your ID card in front of the camera; sharing ability; camera angle; movement etc. First prize is to do a mock interview with your mentor, but you can always make a test meeting for yourself or get a friend to help which you then record and analyse. By prepping correctly beforehand you'll reduce the number of items you need to stress about on the day.

2. Write your speech down to get the flow correct but please don't read it or recite it off by heart. Talk to it with the passion and enthusiasm that you should have for the interesting projects and problems you're showing. The second I'm watching someone read their speech (and yes you can tell) my brain starts to switch off.

3. In the first paragraph of the invitation letter they give guidelines on what the examiners have been told to focus on e.g. your "problem solving" or "management skills". These are unique responses to you and it is where the experience appraisal people feel you had weak patches. This is where you should spend slightly longer in your presentation to make sure you cover it properly. If they've said "general engineering" then they didn't identify a particular area where they have concerns.

4. The last few letters I've seen say "Use 20% of your time as an introduction and overview of your overall training and experience." That means you have 3 minutes to give a brief synopsis of your career history and the range of work you've done. 3 minutes. Don't tell them about your favourite pet or that you like skydiving. This aims to set the scene for the rest of your speech e.g. did you move between fields at all? How long did you work as a technician if you are now a technologist? Has your work been mostly in the office or on site? For public or private enterprises? etc. They need context for who you are so that they can understand the outcomes you are presenting.

5. Don't put too many words on your slides. People are surprisingly poor at listening and reading simultaneously. They will stop listening while they read your essay and you will lose them. Relevant pictures and graphs are good, highly detailed drawings are bad. It needs to be something they can look at while listening to you, not something that steals their focus away.

6. You have a minute on each outcome. That's not a lot. Write and rewrite each outcome until you can summarise it neatly or you will talk too long about one and race through the others to catch up. For example, you don't have to read aloud every course you've ever done for Outcome 11, but rather cover your approach & philosophy to CPD.

7. When discussing each outcome it is better to handle one good example thoroughly than try to give lots of examples. People stop paying attention when listening to lists, instead you have to make it a story for them to listen e.g. when talking to Outcomes 1-2 tell the story of the problem through their wording i.e. how you defined the problem, investigated it, analysed it, found solutions, synthesized solutions (decided which solution was best) and then evaluated it.

8. Your examples don't need to all be from one project but Outcomes 1-3 should be from the same project and often 9 and 10 as well (although that is not essential). Ideally don't use too many projects in total (I'd stick to 3 or fewer) as your listeners will get confused if you keep hopping all over the place. It helps to identify when you start an outcome if you have moved projects "For this outcome I'll be talking about a problem I encountered in the XYZ project covered in my TER 5 and my ER". Remember, you know the projects well, but for your interviewers, you are just one of 100s of submissions.

9. Your interview is not just on your work. It is also about your knowledge and understanding of the engineering world. You need to know who the role players are: ECSA, CESA, SAICE, CIDB, CBE (and others) who they are, what their purpose is and how they relate to each other. If you're saying you were working according to the OSHAct then you'd better know who is responsible for safety on a project according to the act. You're declaring that you are "conversant and adhere to the code of conduct for engineers" ... so you must have read it and be able to give examples from the code e.g. when it is appropriate to review another professional's work. Do your homework.

10. Breathe. They know you are stressed. That's fine. Take a breath, have a sip of water and then answer. Don't get cross, even if you are feeling bullied and interrupted. It's a tactic some people use to see how you react. Be confident in your knowledge and don't be afraid to mention when you do not know the answer. They want to see that you can stay calm and that you know your limits.