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Job interviews can be intimidating, especially if you're not prepared.
There are a number of ways to prepare for a big job interview, but one of the best ways to simulate the actual interview process is by doing a mock interview.
Mock interviews provide candidates with an opportunity to test out their job interview skills with someone who isn't evaluating them for an actual job.
If you're a college student, mock interviews may be offered through career services for students or recent alumni. If you're already in the professional world, a mock interview could be done with a trusted colleague, professional connection, or friend. Never do a mock interview with a family member.
Here are some of the major benefits of a mock interview.
They Help Reduce Stress And Anxiety About Interviewing
If you're not sure how to answer typical job interview questions, mock interviews provide a great opportunity for you to "test drive" your answers. The person conducting the mock job interview can give you feedback on whether or not your responses are suitable.
Unsure about what the most common job interview questions are? Work It Daily has you covered with our list of Common Interview Questions.
They Help Boost Your Confidence
Whoever is conducting the mock job interview can point out your strengths and weaknesses as the interview process goes along, which gives you time to address the weaknesses and build on your strengths. By having confidence in your skills, you will perform better during the actual job interview.
They Provide Constructive Feedback In A Low-Stress Environment
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No one is the perfect candidate, so mock interviews help you clarify responses to certain questions and help you work on areas where you may have weaknesses.
In an actual job interview, you don't usually get feedback about your interviewing abilities, so a mock interview is a perfect opportunity to find out why you may be having some difficulty in landing your dream job.
They Can Help You Prepare For Behavioral-Based Interview Questions
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Many companies use behavioral-based interview questions. If you're not familiar with this type of interviewing, it may be advantageous to give it a practice run in a mock interview.
Practice makes perfect! Even the best athletes struggle without practice, so you should never assume that you could just wing a job interview unprepared.
Take advantage of mock interviewing opportunities even if you think you're skills are at a very high level. There are things that we can all improve upon when it comes to making a great impression on a prospective employer.
While mock interviews are an important part of preparing for an actual job interview, there are many other ways to practice when you're alone. This includes writing down and answering as many potential interview questions as you can think of and practicing over and over again. When practicing alone, it also helps to visualize as much of the interview process as possible.
Work It Daily can also help to give your job interview skills a boost!
Join Work It Daily today and have access to one-on-one coaching from our career growth specialists. You'll also get access to a network of like-minded professionals who will offer daily support and guidance, and courses aimed at helping you grow your career and land your dream job fast.
This post was originally published at an earlier date.
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You receive a patch (with release notes) to fix a couple of bugs in your ERP. Do you really need to test, or can you just install the patch? If you install without testing, then you introduce the risk of having unintended results/consequences. Does that risk outweigh the time savings of not testing?
IT is responsible for understanding how the system is intended to be used and will do some of the testing but not all of it. IT performs testing such as unit, integration, and system testing. The business is responsible for deciding what/how to use the system. Since the business owns the system, they have testing responsibilities too and are responsible for user acceptance testing (UAT).
3 Key Components Of Testing
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The testing effort involved will vary depending on the type and size of the change (e.g. patch/bug fix versus major upgrade/release), but the testing process is typically pretty consistent. There are three (3) key components:
1. It starts with having a test environment separate from the production environment. Individuals can enter different practice workflows without affecting production. Not only can the test environment be used for testing, but it can also be used for training purposes if it’s not cost-effective to have a separate training environment.
2. Creating comprehensive test documents (test plans and scripts). Test for items such as required fields, valid values, and date ranges. Also doing regression testing and stress testing as well as testing system performance and interfaces. The business should specifically test different scenarios from “cradle to grave,” common processes making typical user mistakes, security profiles (including those who shouldn’t have access), reports, etc. Yes, the business should have written UAT test plans/scripts so that they know what they did (and didn’t) test.- Tip #1 – create and use a meaningful naming convention for the test plans/scripts. It will make it easier to identify the purpose of each document without trying to figure it out by reading the entire document.
- Tip #2 – create a description for each test plan/script including creation date, security role, and any special data requirements needed to perform the test.
3. You need to have sufficient data (corresponding to the test plans/scripts) in the test environment to test properly. You can create data manually or use an automated test data generation tool to create test data. Another option is to copy production and obfuscate (aka obscure or scramble) any sensitive data.
Final Thoughts
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Issues discovered during testing should be logged on an issues list, tracked, and remediated. Once the business has completed user acceptance testing (UAT), they should formally sign off that they approve. Then it goes through change management, and IT loads the change into the production environment during the next scheduled maintenance window (unless it’s an emergency).
When you have the three components, then you can continue building on them. With each change, you add/clone more test plans/scripts to the testing documents library. Over time, you’ll have an expansive testing documents library. So, the next time you have a single patch to install, does the risk of not taking the time to test really outweigh the possibility and inconvenience that a potential outage would cause?
For more information on the value of testing, follow me on LinkedIn!
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