Hi Everyone, just a wee update about my experience. I saw an advert last week post by Blue Arrow, for conductors at Queen Street and applied. I had previously applied for a Ticket Examiner at Central and had no reply, so I called the agency to check they had received my application and got a Teams interview next day (this was late last week). Today. I had the assessment in Glasgow. The tests were actually different from the practice booklet I had been sent. The practice booklet had a ticket selling and checking exercise, plus role playing scenarios, mock interviews, verbal reasoning and a letter based version of the "dots" or Group Bourdon or concentration test (known as SCAAT).
At the assessment centre today, there was about 12 people (maybe more) all for conductors roles at either Queen Street or Oban. The tests were RAAT (rules based questions with multiple choice answers - 19 questions in 22 minutes, I think); SCAAT (which was the concentration test that was made up of special keyboard symbols. For the first SCAAT test, you had to mark off 1 symbol over the course of 3 pages; then 2 symbols; then 1 fixed symbol and 1 changing symbol that changed every row.
The 3rd test was customer service scenarios with 4 multiple choice answers that you had to rank in order. I think there was about 20 of these? I might be mistaken. No-one I spoke to felt confident afterwards. Most of the people I spoke with didn't finish any of the tests. The only one I didn't finish was the SCAAT, which is probably impossible to finish. I have no idea how I got on. I am hoping that I've passed.
The Assessor told us to go away and start preparing for our interviews as these are being held by managers on Friday and the medical will be next week, with a start shortly after. The assessor said that a fair few conductors have moved up to drivers and others left/retired. She said there has been a lot of movement internally and that they are creating new jobs so they are expecting to be running the classroom based training every couple of weeks for a bit.
Fingers crossed for me that I've passed the assessment and do well in my interview (if I get one) on Friday.
Any news from anyone else?
The tests on the day are:
SCAAT Symbols (there’s a tool for this in the driver assessment thread - Windows only and you can print the sheets to practice also)
Reading a short railway based paragraph and answering questions on this, this is timed.
Customer service scenarios, they give a scenario where something goes wrong for a customer in different contexts and you have to score the answers in order of likelihood of that being your actions.
Won’t answer the first question as I like the anonymity of the forum.
Assessments, interview and medical were all done within 2 weeks total. Very little notice given for them bar the medical.
Thanks so much for telling me what tests they would give - you were totally spot on!
FOR INFO: Scotrail are currently advertising (as of yesterday) conductor roles in: Perth, Inverness, Dundee and Glasgow Queen Street. If I had applied several months ago and hadn't heard anything back, I would be re-applying.
Be quick! These vacancies will likely be taken down in a day or 2.