I applied for the Control Systems Graduate Programme in November, they sent me the test and once I finished them they told me that I passed them and that they will contact me. In February they sent me an email inviting me to the assessment centre.
The assessment centre took place at RR HQ at Derby. It started at 8am and it was divided into four parts: Competency interview, test, group case and technical interview.
Before the Competency interview, I had to do a 10 min presentation about myself (why I wanted to join RR, how can I add value to the company etc.) that I had to had prepared it from home. Then during the Competency Interview they asked me several questions about the company (tell me about it mains customers, what do you know about RR, tell me something that you have listened in the news recently, something that happened recently at the environment that might affect the company...) and then we started with some questions about myself such as tell me a time when you had to influence a group of people or tell me a time where you had to solve a challenging task.
The next part was a numerical test that was really similar to the one we had to do online (18 questions in 6 min).
For the group case, they divided as in teams (mine was of four) and we had to designed and built a paper plane that had to meet several requirements we were given 30 min for this exercises and at the end, we have to deliver a brief presentation of the work that we had done.
After lunch (they gave as a buffet and we ate with all the assessors, it´s a great opportunity to do some networking ;)!) we did the technical interview.
This interview is the hardest part of the assessment, they push you really hard but the assessor is always trying to help you. Before starting they ask me several questions about engineering, (why I wanted to study it, what I liked most, what I was bad at etc.) and them they gave me a section of a turbine engine and he start asking me questions about it at the beginning quite simple but them very hard and them he told me to design a control system to control the amount of fuel that goes to the engine. Finally, he gave me a paper with four topics and told me to select one of them to speak.
We finished at 4pm, it was a wonderful experience but we all finished exhaust. Another great point of the assessment is that we were 14 but everyone had applied to different roles so you don´t have to compete against them just try to do your best.
Hope this review helps someone and best of the lucks in your interview! :)