Free guide
How to Prepare for an Apprenticeship Interview
A complete preparation guide for UK school leaver apprenticeships. What the four week run-up should look like, the questions employers actually ask, how to build answers that score, and the specific things that get otherwise good candidates rejected.
The four week plan
Preparation fails when it is done in the wrong order. Most people start by reading about the company and leave their own examples until the night before, which is backwards: the examples take the longest and get reused at every stage. Work in this order instead.
Write your stories
Five to seven examples, drawn from part-time work, school projects, sport, volunteering or anything where you had a genuine individual responsibility. Write each one out in full. This is the single highest-value thing you will do, and you will use these same stories on the application form, in the video interview and at the assessment centre.
Practise the assessments
Situational judgement, numerical reasoning and cognitive tests. Do at least one full timed run before the real one. Discovering you are slower than you thought is fine in practice and fatal on the day.
Research the employer properly
Not the careers page. The most recent annual report introduction, one or two news stories from the last few months, and enough of the business model that you could explain what they do in two sentences without jargon.
Rehearse out loud, on camera
Record yourself answering a practice question and watch it back. Then do it again. Reading your answers silently does not prepare you for saying them under time pressure.
If you have less than four weeks: do week 1 and week 4 and skip the rest. Your stories and your delivery are what get scored. Everything else is a bonus.
The questions you will actually be asked
Interview questions vary in wording and almost never in type. Nearly everything you will be asked is one of these four, so prepare by type rather than trying to memorise a list of a hundred questions.
Competency questions
Testing whether you have actually done the thing, and whether you can explain it clearly.
Tell me about a time you worked in a team where something went wrong.
Give me an example of when you had to meet a difficult deadline.
Describe a situation where you had to persuade someone.
Tell me about a time you made a mistake and what you did about it.
Motivational questions
Testing whether you actually want this, or whether you applied to twenty things and this one replied.
Why an apprenticeship rather than university?
Why this employer specifically?
Why this business area or service line?
Where do you want to be in five years?
Situational questions
Testing judgement when you have no direct experience to draw on.
What would you do if you disagreed with a decision your manager made?
You are given a task and you do not understand the instructions. What do you do?
A colleague is not doing their share of a group task. How do you handle it?
Commercial awareness questions
Testing whether you understand what the business does and what is happening to it.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing us in the next year?
Tell me something in the news recently that is relevant to what we do.
Can you explain what this company does in a couple of sentences?
Building answers that score: STAR
Every competency question is scored against a structure. Employers use different names for it, but it is almost always STAR. Answers that skip the structure sound like anecdotes, and anecdotes do not score.
S, Situation: Set the scene in one or two sentences. Enough context to follow, no more. This is the part people overrun.
T, Task: What were you responsible for? What was expected of you specifically?
A, Action: What you did, step by step, using “I” throughout. This should be roughly 60% of the answer. It is the only part being scored properly.
R, Result: What changed. Put a number on it if you can. Then say what you learned or would do differently, which is the part most candidates leave out.
Where to find your examples
You do not need impressive examples. You need specific ones. Assessors are interviewing seventeen and eighteen year olds and calibrate accordingly.
- Part-time or Saturday jobs: a complaint you handled, a shift you covered, a task you ran alone
- School: a group project that went wrong, leading a presentation, a deadline you nearly missed
- Sport, music, Duke of Edinburgh, volunteering, prefect or committee roles
- Any situation where something broke and you either fixed it or learned something from it
The one habit to break
Saying “we”. “We worked well as a team and we got it finished” tells an assessor nothing about you and is the most common reason a competency answer scores low. If you cannot isolate your own contribution, pick a different example.
Free prep pack
Want to see all of this applied to a real employer?
The full PwC School Leaver pack is free: application stages, the competencies they score, real interview questions, commercial awareness, and a pre-submission checklist. The process it walks through is close enough to the other big schemes to prep you for all of them.
The pre-recorded video interview
Most large UK apprenticeship schemes now put a pre-recorded video interview between the application form and the assessment centre. There is no interviewer. You get a question on screen, a short window to prepare, usually around 30 seconds, and a fixed time to answer. It is the stage candidates most often underestimate, because it feels less real than a person and is scored just as hard.
What to do differently
- Look at the camera lens, not at your own face on the screen. It reads as eye contact.
- Use the prep time to structure the answer, not to write it out. Reading a script is obvious on camera.
- Speak slightly slower than feels natural. It sounds measured on playback rather than rushed.
- Quiet room, light in front of you rather than behind, plain background, laptop rather than phone.
- Have your STAR stories on a single sheet next to the laptop, as prompts only, not as a script.
Practise this properly. Record one answer on your phone and watch it back. Almost everyone finds the same three things: too many filler words, too fast, and looking down. All three are fixable in one session and none of them are fixable on the day.
Online assessments and psychometric tests
Before any interview, most schemes ask you to sit online tests: a situational judgement test, and usually a numerical or cognitive reasoning test. This stage removes a large share of applicants, and it is the one where preparation makes the most measurable difference, because the formats are published and practisable.
- Practise with the actual test providers. SHL, Korn Ferry, Cubiks and Talent Q all publish free sample tests.
- Do one full run under real time pressure before the real thing.
- Laptop, wired or strong connection, quiet room, and sit it when you are alert rather than at midnight.
- On situational judgement tests, answer as a professional would rather than as you personally would. There are no trick options.
The assessment centre
The final stage is usually a half or full day at an employer office. The exact mix varies, but it is normally some combination of a group exercise, an individual presentation or written task, and a competency interview with someone senior.
The group exercise, which is the one people get wrong
Assessors are not scoring whether you win the discussion. They are scoring how you behave in a team. The highest scoring single behaviour is usually the least dramatic one: noticing the group has stalled and summarising where it has got to.
The day starts when you walk in. Assessors take note of how candidates behave with reception staff, with each other and during breaks. It is not a formal scored exercise, but it comes up in the debrief.
The “why us” question decides more than you think
This question appears on the application form, again in the video interview, and again at the assessment centre. It is the single most commonly answered badly, because almost everyone gives an answer that would work equally well for a competitor. If your answer survives having the company name swapped out, it is not an answer.
Something specific about them
Not that they are a great company. Cite a service line, a recent announcement, something from the annual report, or something someone who works there told you. Specificity is the entire signal here.
Something specific about the programme
Why this scheme rather than the one down the road? Structure, qualification, rotation model, the fact you pick your area at the start. This is where candidates who have actually read the details separate themselves.
Where it takes you
How this fits what you want in five or ten years. You are not expected to have a precise plan at eighteen. You are expected to have thought about it seriously.
Why capable candidates get rejected
Most rejections are not about ability. They are about preparation, and they repeat in a small number of predictable ways.
One thing worth knowing about timing
Most of the large UK schemes recruit on a rolling basis. They review applications as they arrive and release assessment centre places as they go, so the published closing date is not really the deadline. Applying early in the window is worth more than almost anything else on this page.
Prep for a specific employer
The framework above is the same everywhere. The process is not. Each of these employers runs a different combination of tests, interview format and assessment centre, and each scores against its own published competencies. Free guides for all ten:
PwC interview questions
PwC School Leaver Programme
Goldman Sachs interview questions
Goldman Sachs Higher Apprenticeship
Deloitte interview questions
Deloitte BrightStart
KPMG interview questions
KPMG 360° Apprenticeship
EY interview questions
EY School Leaver Programme
Google interview questions
Google Apprenticeship
Amazon interview questions
Amazon Apprenticeship
Civil Service interview questions
Civil Service Fast Stream Degree Apprenticeship
BBC interview questions
BBC Apprenticeship
NHS interview questions
NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme (Degree Apprenticeship)
Common questions
How long should I spend preparing for an apprenticeship interview?
Around four weeks of light, regular work beats two days of panic. Most of the time goes into writing and rehearsing five to seven STAR stories, because you will reuse the same stories across the application form, the video interview and the assessment centre. If you have less time, prioritise the stories and the 'why this employer' answer over everything else.
What questions are asked in an apprenticeship interview?
Almost all of them fall into four types: competency questions ('tell me about a time you...'), motivational questions ('why this employer, why an apprenticeship'), situational questions ('what would you do if...') and commercial awareness questions ('what challenges does this business face'). The wording changes by employer, the four types do not.
Do I need work experience to pass an apprenticeship interview?
No. Assessors know they are interviewing school leavers. They are scoring the structure of your answer and your reflection on it, not the scale of the example. A shift at a supermarket where you handled an angry customer scores as well as anything, provided you can say what you specifically did and what changed as a result.
What should I wear to an apprenticeship interview?
Business dress for professional services, finance and the Civil Service. Smart casual is usually safe for tech and media employers. If the invitation does not say, dress one level above what you expect the office to be. It is never held against you.
How do I prepare for a pre-recorded video interview?
Record yourself answering a practice question on your phone and watch it back at least twice before the real thing. You will spot the filler words, the pace and the eye contact problems immediately, and none of those are fixable in the 30 seconds of prep time the platform gives you on the day.
Is it worth applying to more than one apprenticeship scheme?
Yes. Places are heavily oversubscribed at every one of the big UK schemes, so strong candidates get rejected routinely. Applying to four or five in parallel is normal. The catch is that each employer runs a different process, so preparation does not transfer automatically between them.
Free prep pack
Start with the free pack, then decide
The full PwC School Leaver pack is free: application stages, the competencies they score, real interview questions, commercial awareness, and a pre-submission checklist. The process it walks through is close enough to the other big schemes to prep you for all of them.