Short Interview

We usually invite people initially for a first short interview - this normally takes no more than 15 minutes. The objective is just to give you a chance to meet us and us a chance to meet you, and to discover whether you would fit in in the Owlery.  There's no particular thing we're looking for, although if you have no sense of humour whatsoever you could probably save yourself the journey to Glossop!

You don't need to prepare for this in any way, although we'd appreciate it if you dressed as you would when giving one of our courses (because your interviewer won't be training that day, he or she might not be quite so presentable ...).  Soon after the short interview we will let you know whether you are invited back for a second, long interview (see below).

Long Interview

If you have been invited for a long interview, this will consist of three parts:

1. A chat with someone (it's far too informal to be called an interview), at which you'll have plenty of time to ask us questions too.
2. A short session (no more than an hour) in which we judge your ability to pick up new software skills. No preparation is needed for this.
3. We ask you to give a short course (normally about 15 minutes long), to see if you have the ability to teach a classroom of up to 6 delegates.

For the short course you do not need to prepare any special courseware or exercises - it is your training ability that we are assessing. You should, however, prepare what you are going to teach. The following notes may prove useful in deciding what to cover:

• You should choose a fairly basic topic - for example, we'd rather be taught about formatting cells in Excel than about enforcing referential integrity in Access.
• Within this constraint, you can choose any software topic in any recent version of Microsoft Office, and can instruct the assembled owls on what they should know (eg "This is the first 15 minutes of an Excel Introductory course, and you have already attended a Windows course"). You should be careful to choose a topic which you already know - we don't care how basic this is.
• You will have a large whiteboard available, and should use it to illustrate points as you are teaching.
• You should engage as much as possible with the people on the course, and be aware at all times of what they are doing.
• Above all, we are looking for people who can teach, and not just people who can present!

You will have as much time as you want before your short course to prepare any diagrams. Our computers will be set up with Office 2007 or Office 2003 (or Office 2000 if you prefer), and there will be no more than 4 people on the course (and there might be as few as 2).

If you have any other questions, please email Sandi - however, please don't do this unless you have already been invited for an interview, and it's not clear exactly what we are expecting from you.