Your first job can shape your whole career. Therefore the importance of landing this first job cannot be underestimated. However, students typically spend less time on preparing for their career than they do for a mid-term test. Unfortunately this means that the best jobs don’t necessarily go to the best candidates. They simply go to the students who had a more pushy university career service or who had parents with “connections”.
How to fix this?
A new startup is addressing this problem. PAC Tests (www.pactests.com), based out of London, is offering online training programs on how to land your dream job. The service promises to equip students with all they need to pass dreaded career tests, such as SHL maths tests. Talking to students at the University of Manchester, we understood that this was indeed a very much needed service so we tested the site ourselves.
Tests from real career tests
In short, PAC Tests provides mathematical reasoning tests that have been previously used by top employers. We scored very low in our first tests, however getting this feedback was something that is missing from a normal graduate application. Therefore simply knowing how well (how badly!) we had done, we knew we had work to do. Over the next week we did one test per day, spending around 30 minutes of our time on each. The trend very clearly was upwards. We still think we would not be strong contenders for today’s graduate schemes, however we are happy to report that our score improved from 12/30 correct answers in our first try to 22/30 correct answers.
How to improve
Practice makes perfect? Maybe, however the other great feature of PAC Tests is the feedback loop. Not only does PAC Tests allow you to retake exams as many times as you want, and give you a score; it also shows you which questions you got wrong and gives you model answers. This we found, was a very useful tool on how to improve our performance on the practice psychometric tests. Overall, we were highly impressed with PAC Tests! 10/10!
Find more information relating to shl test, and math test here.