Help! Job interview for promotion first thing.

[OhPlums]

It's been nearly 10 years since I've had an official job interview, it's an internal one for a promotion and its first thing. I've forgotten everything. I've applied and got this far, written a statement about how I fit the qualities/skills and vaguely fitting the job responsibilities but I'm struggling to prepare for the interview and can't sleep until I've managed to do something for it.

What type of questions will be asked, do I need to try and fit them to the responsibilities or the skills or both? I'm demonstrating quite a bit of the role already in my role as it is but do not want to balls this interview up!

I think honestly try to relax and get some sleep, midnight the night before is not a great time to be trying to cram. I would guess the questions will be relatively straight forward, they won't be aiming to catch you out or anything like that if it's an internal interview for a job you largely do, and any technical questions you should know easily if you just give yourself time to think! Most interviews these days use a competency format, so if you do really want to do some prep I'd look up the STAR(R) model and think of a few good examples you could use. So an example of a competency question is 'Tell me about a time you worked as part of a team' and rather than talking generically about your team working skills, you give a specific structured answer, something like 'When I worked in role A at company B I worked in a team of 10 people spread across sites. There were some issues with communication across sites with missed deadlines as a result. The action I took was to establish regular team catch up meetings by phone where we could review tasks and deadlines. The result was that team relationships improved and customer satisfaction was also up by x% in the next quarter due to reduced errors. On reflection, I feel next time I will be more confident to implement changes sooner as the results were excellent.

If you are able to think of a few examples you can fit them to the question asked, in the example above it fits with team working, communications, leadership, problem solving with a few tweaks...

Other than the competency questions they will almost certainly ask why you want the job, and what skills/experience/qualities you will bring to it so practice an answer to that too...

Good luck!

Good advice above. Don't be worried to say you're going to take a second to think about your answer either. A few seconds pause can give you a chance to structure your answer quickly.

As pp said they're not looking to catch you out. Keep yourself calm, think about what you do with your hands (I gesticulate a lot when nervous so clasp them on my lap).

Good luck!