Work History Interview Questions And Answers

Work experience is any experience that a person gains while working in a specific field or occupation but the expression is widely used to mean a type of volunteer work that is commonly intended for young people often students get a feel for professional working environments.

At university level work experience is often offered between the second and final years of an undergraduate degree course, especially in the science, engineering and computing fields. Courses of this nature are often called sandwich courses with the work experience year itself known as the sandwich year.

All too often applicants rely on where they have been and how long they have been there as proof of previous work experience.
Employers, however, are more interested in what you did.
Listing companies, dates and positions without much supporting information only tells a potential employer that you clocked in every day for so many years. They would much rather know about your achievements.

Being specific and quantifying information whenever possible will help hiring managers choose you. Provide good, solid evidence that you were an accomplished, knowledgeable, hard worker and show that you can bring these attributes to your new place of employment.

In a resume you have to choose your words very carefully. You do not want to write a novel about your previous work experience but you do not want to merely list every job and position you have ever had either.
In order to properly describe your work experience, you should consider where you are sending it.
What work experience does the job require? How can you highlight your achievements in these areas on your resume? Needed strengths differ from position to position.
Take the time to delve into your skills and accomplishments as they fit the position and company. Never lie in your resume or in an interview but make good choices on what to emphasize about your work history.

For answering this question you should think of a few things:
☛ Achievement
☛ Actions
☛ Value and performance
☛ Results

For example:
☛ Great initiatives and fresh ideas.
☛ Have you shaken old methods?
☛ Developed a new program.
☛ Target sales, new sales.
☛ Reached new clients?
☛ Developed a new customer satisfaction procedure?
☛ Improved the accuracy of budget forecasts?
☛ New design on time-schedule.
☛ Achieved project goals.
☛ Established good working relationships with customers.
☛ Great team work.
☛ Established new quality standards.

For answering this question, you should prepare these questions:
☛ How was your target goal measured?
☛ Who was the initiator - you or your bosses?
☛ What did your bosses say after achieving these goals?

Divide the answer into 5 parts:
☛ Define the problem
☛ Analyze the problem
☛ Generating possible solutions
☛ Selecting the best solution and courses of action
☛ Lesson learnt

Describe the problem in the workplace. What makes it a problem? What does this problem involve?

Tell about how you collected information for data analysis, the process you utilized for extracting maximum information from the facts.

Explain the factors taken into consideration when making a decision, how did you get to the root cause of the problem? How did you identify the likely causes of the problem? How did you generate a number of possible solutions?

Describe the actions you took, why did you choose these actions? What results did you expect to achieve? Describe how you organized ideas into process flow and common themes and the way you monitored results. Do not forget the risk management factors.

What did you achieve? What was going right? What did you learn from that experience?

The following are a list of acceptable answers as good reasons to leaving a job:
☛ Career growth
☛ Your career path
☛ Looking for challenges
☛ Restructuring
☛ Relocation
☛ Enhanced Education
☛ Workplace distance

You can easily say that you are looking for a change in role and wanted more growth or even that your position was getting stagnant. This might be an acceptable reason for quitting your job but this by no means gives you leeway to criticize your job.

One reason is basic dissatisfaction with your career. Remember that it is not about the particular company or the department but your career on the whole. This reason would hold true if you have a rich career profile and are currently applying for a job in a new profession.

One of the most common and simple reasons is that your job was at a standstill and you wished to seek newer avenues and greater challenges.

For example:
☛ Better quality performance or reliability?
☛ Did you make any difference in sales numbers, costs and profits?
☛ What about customer satisfaction?
☛ Did you improve support service level? What about productivity, efficiency and the company's reputation? Did you make any difference?
It would be wise for you to present a career achievement that reflects back to the job requirements and to the company to which you are applying.
In this way, you gain the employer's interest, tell a success story where you have had a challenge with an impressive achievement.

Another common reason nowadays is company restructuring. When a company restructures, it can lay off several people and in a time frame. Therefore, even if you have not been directly told to go, nobody would blame you if you are looking for avenues because your colleagues or some other department has been told to go.

More often than not, relocation is another reason that is blindly accepted by a company as a reason for looking for another job.
While these are just some of the traditional reasons for a job change, there are some reasons that are more or less accepted today.

Sometimes, even reasons related to daily commutation, like spending too much time commuting from your place of work to your place of residence, as well as less time spent with family can be considered to be the reason/one of the reasons for leaving a job.

Another reason that can be provided is enhancement of abilities and education. If you have recently acquired a degree and have decided to utilize your education to enhance your professional profile, this would be a good reason to give for this question.

I would define success at work by what I learned from key job assignments experiences. I believe in making choices, tying them to circumstances and taking corrective actions when necessary. I always want to try new things and ask for feedback that leads to improved results.
Some people learn more than others and you would want to present that you are among those who are capable of learning new things.
Low performing employees seem to have more difficulty learning from experience and have trouble making the transition to different jobs and challenges.

Most researches show that the single best predictor for who will perform well and succeed in a new job is the one who possesses learning agility (a quick learner) and the one who can adjust himself/herself to new and different jobs.
Past performance or even experience, skills and intelligence are not as important as learning agility.
Therefore, there is a tried and tested reply to this question that helps you appear level-headed and knowledgeable.