Week 8 - How to speak to an Interviewer / Manager

"There is a very big difference between being professional and being a professional"

Anhar

Our young people have a good internal understanding of professionalism and are able to recognise it in people (i.e. workers slouching, chewing gum, talking inappropriately). But they find it hard to define what exactly being professional is. 

Anhar defines it as:

"performing the role that you've been hired to do to the best of your ability"

It's difficult to define since there are so many ways of being unprofessional, but far fewer examples of being professional. We started by improving one part of them to quickly boost their professionalism: language. Every time somebody used slang or a swear word they word receive a point against their name. As a prize, everyone with 0 points would get an extra 30 mins of help with their CV. The game went on for the full 2 hour session, and ended with only three people on 0 points. Some of the really high scorers had as many as 10 points to their names.

At the end, each person was given a work based scenario and asked how they would deal with it professionally. Some of the scenarios and approaches include:

You see a close friend at work stealing from the shop...

Bobby and Shahina both (independently from each other) decided they would approach their friend and try to reason with him/her to give the item back, one going so far as to threaten to go to the manager.

Both gave great performances and did exactly what we would want them to do when confronted with this situation within a working environment!