I applied online and I got invited to an assessment centre pretty quickly. The online portal is really easy to use and each stage of the application is very clearly laid out and the instructions are easy to follow. When booking onto the assessment centre you get a choice of about 3 days and either the morning or afternoon for each day which I thought was pretty good. The assessment day is online which I like because it means you don’t have to travel – it isn’t as easy to present yourself as you would in a face-to-face assessment day though (I hope they take this into account). For the assessment day you have 5 activities to complete. For each activity you get a brief before it starts so you are fully prepared going into it. The activities are an interview, group activity, written exercise, role play and conversation with a care experienced young person. I found the day to go quite quickly, but I did think it was laid out very well with plenty of time allocated for breaks or to have 5 minutes to just take a breather. Some of the activities were a lot harder than others. At points it felt as if they expect you to have this full catalogue of knowledge on how to be a social worker and to know exactly what to do and how to react in certain situations. This, for me, was really off-putting because it’s meant to be a 2-year scheme where you learn how to respond to these types of situations and how to deal with certain people. I do think that they could – and should – take this into consideration as it has put me off entering this field of work and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels like this. Interview – 35 minutes and interviewed by a qualified social worker. They were friendly and allowed you time to think about your answer. The questions were pretty standard but be prepared to be asked about a difficult situation you’ve experienced. Group activity – 30 minutes. Given 5 cases and 10 minutes to discuss as a group and say what you would do about them, followed by 2 minutes to discuss with the assessors. You then get some additional information and another 10 minutes to discuss as a group followed by another 2-minute discussion with the assessors. There needs to be more group discussion time as people can easily talk over others but make sure you do speak up! Written exercise – 25 minutes for the whole task. You have to write a mock email response to a social work brief. Very clear and simple instructions and you get given a lot of background information. Keep an eye on the time as it goes very quickly – I would recommend starting a timer. Role play – 15-minute brief followed by 20-minute activity. Very difficult. You take on the role of a newly qualified social worker having a meeting with someone played by an actor. This was a very challenging activity and you’re thrown in at the deep end, and the actor gets very into their role and came across as harsh and rude. I appreciate that you do have to deal with people like this in this job but it was a lot for someone who was on an assessment day. I didn’t feel as though the assessors were as sympathetic as they could be as they could clearly see I was out of my element. Conversation with a care experienced young person. You have a 5-minute conversation where you’re completely in the lead. This is difficult as they don’t give you anything at all and it gets pretty awkward. Then they ask you questions for 5 minutes about why you want to be a social worker and your motivation for applying. Overall, the assessment centre ran very smoothly and was laid out in a very good way but I do think that they need to take into consideration that the people applying are not social workers and may not have a lot of knowledge on how to deal with certain types of people or behaviours. I also feel that the assessors could have been a bit more emphatic, they didn’t really offer any friendly smiles and came across a bit cold at times.