HR Administrator Job in the NHS coming up - I'm DESPERATE to get back to work, any tips?

[SigmaDG]

I've been at home with the kids for a few years, and now I am chomping at the bit to get out there and do something really well. I want this job more than I've wanted anything for quite some time. I've been a busy office manager with HR administration as one of my roles in the past, but haven't done the exact job. What are they looking for that I should focus on?

There is a '10 minute IT test' What should I brush up on? And which version? I've not used MS office for years, but used to be a hotshot with it, but I don't have it on my Mac and will have to go to the local college to reacquaint myself with it - time will therefore be short. I did a lot of mail merges once upon a time, but if asked to do it now would take more than 10 minutes to remember where everything was. I know Access best of the set, but didn't use Excel for much other than a few sums. I can program in visual basic though, so can't imagine it would be a challenge for more than a morning , but that won't help in the immediacy of a test!

Anything you could offer to get this, at present invisible, 40 something year old woman back into paid employment would be massively appreciated!

If it's a well-written person spec, I would dig into that and make sure I'd prepared answers related to all the essential criteria on there (sorry if I'm stating the obvious, I don't mean to, but our NHS HR used to advocate using the person spec to structure our interview questions and notes, so as to be sure we were treating each candidate equally). There may be questions around handling confidential information, processing recruitment applications anonymously, data protection, the importance of DBS checks, responding to multiple queries and prioritising them appropriately. I would guess it's likely you might be working for a team, so have more than one person asking you to do stuff, so perhaps prepare something about how you'd handle that? I'd be surprised if the IT test was any more complex than producing a standard letter to a candidate, or updating an excel database, especially if they are only giving you ten minutes. Good luck!