Add a mini interview step to end of ITP - #1951
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| Throughout ITP you have now had experience building projects, giving demos, and now it's time to put it all together. | ||
| During today's class, you will take part in a very short interview where you can practice with an interviewer during a discussion about a recent project you built. |
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I think "during a discussion" is not quite right here - idk i keep reading this sentence wrong
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| Being able to answer questions in an interview setting is a vital skill for employability, you won't get a job without this! | ||
| It will also help to build on the earlier "Answering demo questions" workshop, and improve your ability to communicate about code with colleagues. | ||
| This is also practice before the Checkpoint stage. |
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Practice ahead of the Checkpoint stage that includes a interview?
| If you have multiple volunteers or staff in a large class, share the interviews out. | ||
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| Here are some tips: | ||
| * Check the slack beforehand, to familiarise yourself with the project each trainee wants to talk about |
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should they check projects before the Saturday or just on the Saturday before they start interviews?
| Here are some tips: | ||
| * Check the slack beforehand, to familiarise yourself with the project each trainee wants to talk about | ||
| * Ask the trainee to open up the code on their machine, and discuss it there, don't take over controlling their machine | ||
| * We don't want to give trainees undue stress, so keep to the time limits suggested |
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Maybe just re-iterate the timings here for them
Poonam-raj
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Bits and bobs i spotted
illicitonion
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I left a few comments on small thoughts...
On the bigger questions - I'm not sure about class as the right venue for this. I would love for it to be. But I suspect it will lead to not getting as much feedback as we'd like because the volunteers in class may not happen to be experienced interviewers, or may not happen to have experience giving feedback about interviews.
I've been framing to our mock interviewers that there are four different things we're looking for in mock interviews:
- Confidence
- Experience interviewing
- Feedback
- Assessment
And it feels like a workshop with whatever volunteers happen to be around will give 1 and 2 but not necessarily 3 or 4.
Given we are establishing a pool of mock interviewers, maybe we could lean on them? Maybe the way we could organise this is:
- Keep this workshop as-is, but maybe frame it as "practice for your first organised mock interview" (or maybe don't reframe it at all) - this still gives useful confidence and experience, and may give people some useful feedback
- Add an additional backlog item which is that they need to do an online mock interview
- Grab 10 of our mock interviewers (which may include staff), and set up 10x 1-hour blocks where people can book in for a online mock interview. Brief those mock interviewers that they're doing basically the same as this in-class exercise, and have them repeat it.
This also gives the trainees a mix of in-person and online interview experience, which is helpful.
WDYT?
| This is also practice before the Checkpoint stage. | ||
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| The key to interviews is being able to convince the interviewer that you fully understand the code in a project. | ||
| We want to practice with a decent sized project, so here are some of the ones you could use: |
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I'd recommend just having everyone use their TV Show Project - I'm not sure giving trainees a choice here is useful, and it makes it easier for the volunteers (who only need to familiarise themselves with one project)
| It will also help to build on the earlier "Answering demo questions" workshop, and improve your ability to communicate about code with colleagues. | ||
| This is also practice before the Checkpoint stage. | ||
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| The key to interviews is being able to convince the interviewer that you fully understand the code in a project. |
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| The key to interviews is being able to convince the interviewer that you fully understand the code in a project. | |
| It's important in interviews is being able to convince the interviewer that you fully understand the code in a project. You need to be able to explain _any_ of the code in your project, even if someone else wrote it. |
| If interviewers spot these, it could be a sign a trainee doesn't understand code. | ||
| Trainees should practice and avoid: | ||
| * Being unsure where different parts of code are, or having difficulty navigating a project | ||
| * Spending too much time reading code line by line, unable to give a high level overview |
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| * Spending too much time reading code line by line, unable to give a high level overview | |
| * Just reading what the code does. We want to make sure they can explain _why_ and _how_ it works, not just reading the code |
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| ## Advice for the facilitator |
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I think giving a bit more of a script for the interviewer:
- Ask the trainee to introduce themselves
- Pick one piece of functionality (e.g. "searching for an episode"), and ask the trainee to show the code and explain how it works.
It'd probably also be useful for us to include a video of an example interview (though I don't expect many people will actually watch it)
Co-authored-by: Poonam <61753159+Poonam-raj@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Poonam <61753159+Poonam-raj@users.noreply.github.com>
3 participants
Adding a mini interview workshop for the end of ITP, to give a bit of practice and set expectations prior to checkpoint.
Questions for team:
Backlog ticket
Labels: Core, Submit:Slack, Priority:Mandatory, Module:Data Flows, Sprint: 3, Size: Tiny
Workshop prep: Submit a project for a small interview on saturday
During this week's class, you will take part in a very short interview (5 minutes) where you will practice with an interviewer during a discussion about a recent project you built.
You may want to check it out on the day plan (TODO include a link) to see exactly what will be involved.
We want to practice with a decent sized project, so please pick one of the projects you completed earlier in ITP:
Tic Tac Toe,
The todo list,
Slideshow with stretch tasks
The TV Project,
The Codewars API Project
Then submit it to a thread in your region's slack channel, so saturday volunteers can see what you want to be interviewed about. One person should start a thread if there isn't one already.