Now that you've landed your elevator pitch, it's time to start preparing for some of the questions you can expect to come up in your interviews. You'll want to think about the types of experiences and projects you'd like your interviewer to know about. While you may not know exactly what questions will be asked, it's important to feel prepared to discuss a few scenarios that can be applied to common interview questions. Interviewers will commonly ask a variety of behavioral, hypothetical, and factual questions. Behavioral questions are those that allow the interviewee to share an example when they had to practice a particular skill. You can think of these as the tell me about a time when questions. Interviewers that ask hypothetical questions would typically present a scenario to you and then ask you how you'd go about working through that experience. These questions are more difficult to prepare for, because there are infinite scenarios for an interviewer to present. But we'll talk through ways you can land these questions confidently. Finally, you may see some factual questions come up in an interview. Factual questions aim to assess you on your knowledge of basic project management skills. For example, what are the steps to initiating a project? How do you know when you can move on to the next step? In fact, these questions might look familiar to some of the assessments you've completed throughout the certificate program. Behavioral, hypothetical, and factual questions aim to assess your role-related knowledge. Basically, an interviewer wants to know if you have the skills to perform well in the role. Your responses to these questions will assess how you prioritize competing deadlines, if you can effectively manage budget and workload, and how you work with others, for example. When preparing for an upcoming interview, think about the common project manager skills that a company is looking for, by reviewing job descriptions. Then, think about the experiences you've had that really showcase those skills. It may be a past work experience, a school project, or an activity you completed in this program. It's important that you provide clear responses to your interviewer. So we recommend the STAR method. STAR stands for situation, task, action, and result. It's a great way to organize your response, following a story-like structure. Let's break these down further. First, you begin with a situation. For example, if your interviewer asked you, "Tell me about a time when you had a project deliverable that was not going to meet high-quality expectations. What did you do?" Using the STAR method, you'll want to explain the situation in the experience you'll be using to answer their question. It's important to share the right amount of context. While you want them to understand the complexities you were dealing with, sharing everyone's individual role may be unnecessary to share for the purpose of the question. Now that you've set the scene, you'll need to speak about the specifics. What was the task or your involvement or responsibility in the scenario? What deliverable were you assigned to complete? What was the quality you are aiming for? Next, you'll provide more detail. What action or actions did you take? This is where you really want to highlight your contributions. When did you realize your deliverable was not meeting the quality standards you were aiming for? What was your reaction to this? What decisions did you make to course correct? Who did you partner with, and how did you communicate this to your manager or team? This part of your response may take up the most time to cover as you can highlight multiple skills here, but make sure to keep a clear and structured response. The final part of your response, should be focused on the result. Here, you should discuss the outcome from the decisions you made and the impact you had. In some cases, especially if you're sharing an experience that came with challenges, it may make some sense to share the lessons you've learned. Finally, where possible, use data to reinforce your response. Practicing the STAR method in your responses and preparing for a few scenarios in advance will help you feel more confident going into an interview. Let's cover a simple example. Suppose the interview question is, tell me about a time when you faced a challenge during implementation. I'd start with the situation. We were working on launching a new internal support tool in my region by the end of the year. It was crucial to have it launched before everyone took end of year vacation. But we were facing delays due to a lengthy stakeholder sign-off process. Then, I'd move into this task portion. I was responsible for managing this project end to end and ensuring we rolled out the support tool to all of the employees in my region. Next, the action I took. To ensure we would meet our timeline, I took a look at the sign-off process and noticed it called for hundreds of terms, documents, pamphlets, and video reviews that had to be signed off by every person in the team. This wasn't the appropriate level of detail needed from these stakeholders, or a valuable use of their time. I summarized the areas of concern and opportunity that the stakeholders needed to approve and created a condensed review process. As a result, we were able to mitigate the delays in the sign-off and launch the tool on time in December. While coming prepared with responses is important, interviewing is not just about answering questions. It's a conversation between you and the interviewer to learn more about the role and see if you can envision yourself in that job. Before your interview, you should also do some research into the company. What are some questions that come to mind? Do you want to know more about the company culture? Are you looking to find out what types of projects you'd be managing? What does success look like for someone new in this role? Employers know that you have questions. In fact, that's what they're expecting. As your interviewer is responding to your questions, listen and ask any follow-ups so they know what's important to you, and so you learn more about what it be like working in that role. Ultimately, the most important thing is to be prepared for an interview. That means spending time thinking through experiences that showcase your skills. Practicing how you'd like to structure your responses and preparing questions you'd like to ask your interviewer. This will also help your confidence, which can show up in your demeanor and go a long way. In the next video, we'll chat through tips for interviewing remotely. See you there.
