Kelvin
Badgeman
Because there isn’t one yet, here is a diary for the AIB 2018 format. I’m happy to answer any questions. Hopefully @photface will be able to corroborate some of my thoughts.
Preface
Our group was made of 2 boards, Board 1 with four candidates and Board 3 with three candidates.
5 Passed, 1 failed and 1 was unknown when our board left.
No two people were applying for the same role, off the top of my head we had:
Warfare
ME
ME (Sub)
WE (Upper yardy)
Reserves
Marines
A lot of the tips here were given by staff.
Day 1:
Arrival
Arrival is now between 10 and 11. Aim to get there closer to 10 as you'll want a chance to unpack and get into your sports kit ready for the run at 11. You'll notice a poster of PLT securing techniques in your room, don't worry about this yet as it makes little sense out of context.
Run
The run is the same 8 (and a bit) laps around the AstroTurf pitch as previous years; the surface is not fantastic under foot and you are given no indication of your times, all you can do here is give best effort.
Quick shower and change back into formal attire.
Welcome/Lunch
This is a bit of a blur for some reason. We had a quick lunch (15mins) in the candidate’s dining room. This was followed by a welcome from one of the boarding officers; just some light words of encouragement and a reminder to "be your most confident self".
PLT Pratice
Bus hop to the PLT hangar. Here we spent a couple of hours covering every technique required to complete the PLTs, every person had a go at every technique before having a go at a PLT with all 7 candidates.
There is a lot to take in here but it's essential you retain as much as possible. There are no tricks to solving the PLTs, every possible technique you will need will be shown to you.
Practice Plan Ex
By this point you’ve hopefully practiced a few of these. With only 7.5 mins you may struggle to get all your notes down but this exercise is notably simpler than the real deal. If you’ve already practiced these there’s not much too learn but some people did discover their note taking technique wasn’t ideal for pulling out information quickly. I used a 2x2 grid with headings and a separate area for essential facts (e.g sunset), this was a life saver the next day.
Free Time
By this point it was about 1630, so we opted to watch the curling and practice some PLT techniques before dinner at 1830 (curry night), after which we made a quick trip to the pub and returned for bed 2030(wild).
Day 2
0615 – Call to hands
0645 – Breakfast
0715 – Board 1 ready for PlanEx, Board 3 in PLT gear ready for PLT.
PLT
As a 3 person board we were given a Stand in Candidate (STIC), this was a staff member who will only do as instructed. If you have one, use them to secure the first item and get them out the way.
Before commencing any tasks we were taken into a separate room and each given our scenario. We were then given 15 minutes to write/draw a solution alone; if you remember the techniques you will not need remotely that long to get a solution down, and if you don’t have a solution it’s always an option to simply ask your team at the start of the task.
For the leaderless task, no one individual stood out as in charge but as a team we worked well together despite not completing the objective. If you have a strong character in your team they will likely dominate the scenario from the beginning, don’t worry about it too much. If they are too dominating they will be marked down for it and as long as you are vocal and contributing you are doing okay here.
For your individual task you will be given 30 seconds to reread your plan from earlier, you will then be given the objective again to shout to your team. You now have 8 minutes to deliver your plan, join your team and complete the objective. The only one we completed was mine, but as it was the fourth scenario we had the securing techniques down and our general efficiency was better. All three of us thought our performance wasn’t up to scratch here due to poor command presence (voice projection) but were later informed by the board president that while our projection was poor, we had all shown strong leadership during our tasks despite this.
PLANEX
Our PLTs took ~1 hour and upon return we were straight into the PlanEx.
15 mins – Given map and scenario. Note as many important details as possible, especially times, vehicles, speeds, actors, current aims and constraints.
Straight into another room with your notes, you’ll now be given a problem by an officer.
15 mins – Discuss as a team your solution. Here you should immediately set out your 3 main aims. Generally it seems there will be at least three obvious problems in any scenario: a casualty, a secondary but not life-threatening issue, a time constraint. A reasonable guide here is:
· Aims – 2 mins
· Discussion – 8 mins
· Forming Plan – 4 mins
· Finalise Plan – 1 mins
While forming the plan, nominate someone who agrees with it to report it to the board, they’ll want to begin preparing their notes.
Questioning:
This will almost certainly not go well. Firstly, you’ll remove your notes from view. You will be asked every question possible, from what time it is, to which character you are, to your current plan. Any piece of information you received could be asked about, you will not know every answer. You will be challenged on some of your ideas, there was a chance one of our team would become stranded somewhere (safe, but stranded) and we were forced to defend this as acceptable due to the emergency situation.
The officer questioning you will be trying to steer you towards the ideal solution, they will also be trying to steer you towards a worse solution. In my personal opinion, PlanEx guides usually put too much emphasis on practicing speed/distance/time; if I was doing it again I’d spend far more time working on improving information retention.
New Written Section:
Once the questioning was complete we were given a new problem in the scenario, this problem rendered our previous solution impossible. We were now given 20 minutes to type our plans using a point brief format.
The sections were along the lines of: Overview, Aims, Plan, and Summary. You are not marked on writing ability here but instead on plan feasibility and if you conveyed the right information. All three of our board chose different plans here and all three of us were marked down for feasibility due to all having faults/assumptions.
With the 20 minutes over, we now delivered our plans one-by-one to the board using the map and no notes. The questioning officer will now tell you if there is a fault in this plan and give you an opportunity correct it, if you do so you can gain back some feasibility points.
Round Robin
Psychometric tests – You will do these spread out over 2-3 hours. They are not worth a great deal of points and seemed quite insignificant at the time. All candidates felt they ran out of time towards the end of the abstract reasoning and numeracy sections.
Interview
The line of questioning seemed to have changed notably this year. No candidate in our group, or the group from the day previous (4 boards total) were asked a single question on Navy Knowledge and a staff member indicated that if you were asked it would be very general. All candidates first question was simply “Tell us about yourself in 2 minutes”, all candidates were asked about a time they showed moral courage, all candidates were asked why an officer, why their branch, why the RN.
Most questions were asked to try and gauge more about a candidates personality, some examples from our interviews include:
· Tell us about a time you showed compassion.
· Tell us about a time you showed resilience.
· Is it justifiable that armed forces personnel sometimes die in peace time?
· Officers look down on young officers, RN officers look down on RNR officers, discuss.
· What if your political views upset the crew on board your ship?
· Tell us about a time you were out of your comfort zone.
· When was the happiest you’ve ever been?
This is not an interrogation, they are genuinely just trying to figure out what kind of person you are. Honesty is the best policy here, pour your heart out if need be but try and stick to the STAR method (situation, task, action, and result). If the question asks for your opinion, then give it. If you really can’t think of an example say so.
Results
At this point we were incredibly grateful the run was now on Day 1, as we were now one hour ahead of Board 1 and would have been forced to wait until they caught up. Instead, we all got our results before 3 o’clock.
¼ PLTS’s finished
0/3 Complete PLANEX Solutions
3/3 Passed from the board.
You really are not being assessed on the completion of the tasks.
Preface
Our group was made of 2 boards, Board 1 with four candidates and Board 3 with three candidates.
5 Passed, 1 failed and 1 was unknown when our board left.
No two people were applying for the same role, off the top of my head we had:
Warfare
ME
ME (Sub)
WE (Upper yardy)
Reserves
Marines
A lot of the tips here were given by staff.
Day 1:
Arrival
Arrival is now between 10 and 11. Aim to get there closer to 10 as you'll want a chance to unpack and get into your sports kit ready for the run at 11. You'll notice a poster of PLT securing techniques in your room, don't worry about this yet as it makes little sense out of context.
Run
The run is the same 8 (and a bit) laps around the AstroTurf pitch as previous years; the surface is not fantastic under foot and you are given no indication of your times, all you can do here is give best effort.
Quick shower and change back into formal attire.
Welcome/Lunch
This is a bit of a blur for some reason. We had a quick lunch (15mins) in the candidate’s dining room. This was followed by a welcome from one of the boarding officers; just some light words of encouragement and a reminder to "be your most confident self".
PLT Pratice
Bus hop to the PLT hangar. Here we spent a couple of hours covering every technique required to complete the PLTs, every person had a go at every technique before having a go at a PLT with all 7 candidates.
There is a lot to take in here but it's essential you retain as much as possible. There are no tricks to solving the PLTs, every possible technique you will need will be shown to you.
Practice Plan Ex
By this point you’ve hopefully practiced a few of these. With only 7.5 mins you may struggle to get all your notes down but this exercise is notably simpler than the real deal. If you’ve already practiced these there’s not much too learn but some people did discover their note taking technique wasn’t ideal for pulling out information quickly. I used a 2x2 grid with headings and a separate area for essential facts (e.g sunset), this was a life saver the next day.
Free Time
By this point it was about 1630, so we opted to watch the curling and practice some PLT techniques before dinner at 1830 (curry night), after which we made a quick trip to the pub and returned for bed 2030(wild).
Day 2
0615 – Call to hands
0645 – Breakfast
0715 – Board 1 ready for PlanEx, Board 3 in PLT gear ready for PLT.
PLT
As a 3 person board we were given a Stand in Candidate (STIC), this was a staff member who will only do as instructed. If you have one, use them to secure the first item and get them out the way.
Before commencing any tasks we were taken into a separate room and each given our scenario. We were then given 15 minutes to write/draw a solution alone; if you remember the techniques you will not need remotely that long to get a solution down, and if you don’t have a solution it’s always an option to simply ask your team at the start of the task.
For the leaderless task, no one individual stood out as in charge but as a team we worked well together despite not completing the objective. If you have a strong character in your team they will likely dominate the scenario from the beginning, don’t worry about it too much. If they are too dominating they will be marked down for it and as long as you are vocal and contributing you are doing okay here.
For your individual task you will be given 30 seconds to reread your plan from earlier, you will then be given the objective again to shout to your team. You now have 8 minutes to deliver your plan, join your team and complete the objective. The only one we completed was mine, but as it was the fourth scenario we had the securing techniques down and our general efficiency was better. All three of us thought our performance wasn’t up to scratch here due to poor command presence (voice projection) but were later informed by the board president that while our projection was poor, we had all shown strong leadership during our tasks despite this.
PLANEX
Our PLTs took ~1 hour and upon return we were straight into the PlanEx.
15 mins – Given map and scenario. Note as many important details as possible, especially times, vehicles, speeds, actors, current aims and constraints.
Straight into another room with your notes, you’ll now be given a problem by an officer.
15 mins – Discuss as a team your solution. Here you should immediately set out your 3 main aims. Generally it seems there will be at least three obvious problems in any scenario: a casualty, a secondary but not life-threatening issue, a time constraint. A reasonable guide here is:
· Aims – 2 mins
· Discussion – 8 mins
· Forming Plan – 4 mins
· Finalise Plan – 1 mins
While forming the plan, nominate someone who agrees with it to report it to the board, they’ll want to begin preparing their notes.
Questioning:
This will almost certainly not go well. Firstly, you’ll remove your notes from view. You will be asked every question possible, from what time it is, to which character you are, to your current plan. Any piece of information you received could be asked about, you will not know every answer. You will be challenged on some of your ideas, there was a chance one of our team would become stranded somewhere (safe, but stranded) and we were forced to defend this as acceptable due to the emergency situation.
The officer questioning you will be trying to steer you towards the ideal solution, they will also be trying to steer you towards a worse solution. In my personal opinion, PlanEx guides usually put too much emphasis on practicing speed/distance/time; if I was doing it again I’d spend far more time working on improving information retention.
New Written Section:
Once the questioning was complete we were given a new problem in the scenario, this problem rendered our previous solution impossible. We were now given 20 minutes to type our plans using a point brief format.
The sections were along the lines of: Overview, Aims, Plan, and Summary. You are not marked on writing ability here but instead on plan feasibility and if you conveyed the right information. All three of our board chose different plans here and all three of us were marked down for feasibility due to all having faults/assumptions.
With the 20 minutes over, we now delivered our plans one-by-one to the board using the map and no notes. The questioning officer will now tell you if there is a fault in this plan and give you an opportunity correct it, if you do so you can gain back some feasibility points.
Round Robin
Psychometric tests – You will do these spread out over 2-3 hours. They are not worth a great deal of points and seemed quite insignificant at the time. All candidates felt they ran out of time towards the end of the abstract reasoning and numeracy sections.
Interview
The line of questioning seemed to have changed notably this year. No candidate in our group, or the group from the day previous (4 boards total) were asked a single question on Navy Knowledge and a staff member indicated that if you were asked it would be very general. All candidates first question was simply “Tell us about yourself in 2 minutes”, all candidates were asked about a time they showed moral courage, all candidates were asked why an officer, why their branch, why the RN.
Most questions were asked to try and gauge more about a candidates personality, some examples from our interviews include:
· Tell us about a time you showed compassion.
· Tell us about a time you showed resilience.
· Is it justifiable that armed forces personnel sometimes die in peace time?
· Officers look down on young officers, RN officers look down on RNR officers, discuss.
· What if your political views upset the crew on board your ship?
· Tell us about a time you were out of your comfort zone.
· When was the happiest you’ve ever been?
This is not an interrogation, they are genuinely just trying to figure out what kind of person you are. Honesty is the best policy here, pour your heart out if need be but try and stick to the STAR method (situation, task, action, and result). If the question asks for your opinion, then give it. If you really can’t think of an example say so.
Results
At this point we were incredibly grateful the run was now on Day 1, as we were now one hour ahead of Board 1 and would have been forced to wait until they caught up. Instead, we all got our results before 3 o’clock.
¼ PLTS’s finished
0/3 Complete PLANEX Solutions
3/3 Passed from the board.
You really are not being assessed on the completion of the tasks.
Last edited: