Job Interview Questions on Organising and Planning
At each workplace it is utterly important that you are highly organised. Well organised employees not only work more effectively and are more productive than their counterparts but also experience less stress and feel more in control. Being late, forgetting things or loosing focus or purpose is stressful and time wasting. Workers with lack of control over what has been done and what needs to be done perform poorly and often need extra time to find, respond, act or perform their duties. If you tend to be unorganised evaluate the true cost of how much time or effort you loose at daily, weekly or monthly bases. If you are organised person planning and scheduling your tasks and workload then I am sure that you can attest to the peace of mind that overwhelming seems manageable.
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How to answer questions on organising and planning
Planning is one of the most important time management skills. When you try to draft some answers to questions that evaluate your ability to organise, plan and schedule workload, complex projects or events you may want to create timeline by focusing on start and end date and then set up goals and break the work that would need to be done to reach the goals. See example gantt chart below displaying 7 week plan of department project.
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Time management is so important that nearly at each job interview you would be asked questions related to planning i.e. provide an example of a time when you were given a task or project to complete - how did you go about organising your work and setting up your priorities? In an interview to come across as organised individual show that you are fully capable to set deadlines, establish priorities and schedule related activities. Demonstrate that you can logically arrange resources to use your time effectively. Show that you can arrange the order in which particular task is carried out and when the work on the task should begin. Prove that you can bring together all activities in planned and constructive manner to ensure the deadlines are met, quality maintained and costs controlled.
Remember, employers look for organising skills as well as being able to deliver plans on time and within agreed budgets. Below you will be provided with short sample answer to put into practice the above; if you preparing for interview see also how to answer job interview questions to help with your preparation.
Sample Job Interview answer
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Situation
As a marketing research assistant I carried out research project to measure the impact of product quality issues on future purchase intentions of our customers in the UK and Italy. I had a month time to complete the project and suggest quality improvement budgets to my line manger.
Action
Before I started I created a set of goals that would be involved in completing my project and then I broke down the work that would need to be done to reach those goals. I did identify the amount of time needed to complete each of the tasks and arranged them in order of importance. I tackled higher priority and more demanding tasks early on in the project. That is, at the outset, I carried out in depth interviews with 30 regular consumers of the products to understand the range of quality issues they had encountered to have plenty of time to get to the bottom of the things and to avoid any delays. Additionally, I made a list of every risk that I could think of that might stop me from reaching my goals and I added some extra time to schedule in case any issues happened to come up.
Result
I not only managed to complete the project ahead of schedule to enable early implementation of quality improvement budgets on areas of most importance to consumers but I also cut the overall cost of the project by 15 per cent by efficient allocation of resources to meet the proposed goals.
Final thoughts…
Remember to always answer your question in S.T.A.R format outlying the situation, describing task and demonstrating your actions and the impact your actions had on the overall outcome and results. If possible, conclude your answer with specific results you achieved expressed in fact and figures.