Small EL: Developing Professional Skills Through Mock Interviews

Through this Small EL activity, students develop interview skills by participating in mock interviews, providing peer feedback, and reflecting on their professional identity. The activity was designed to help students communicate their strengths effectively and prepare for future employment opportunities. Working collaboratively, students practice responding to interview questions, incorporate peer feedback, and connect their experiences to course concepts through structured reflection. By revisiting their performance and identifying specific actions for improvement, students strengthen communication, critical thinking, and professional self-awareness while building confidence for future interviews and workplace interactions.

• Activity Setting: Online
• Time for activity: 1-2 hours in class
• Assessment Approach: Part of Specifications Grading
• Assessment Type: Peer Assessment
• Weight in Final Grade: 5%

Learning outcomes

1. Students acquire and apply professional skills and personal development to behaviour, decision-making and goal setting in work and learning settings.
2. Students enhance and articulate an understanding of your personal strengths and how you relate to and collaborate with others (roles, responsibilities).
3. Students reflect on and articulate/communicate learnings and make connections between your work and academic experiences.
4. Students create goals and plan next steps based on learning for on-going professional development (experiences plus reflections).

Course description

Introduction to the foundational and transferable skills that support success in workplace, volunteer and professional settings. Through a current paid work, volunteer or career exploration experience, students will identify skills that support their success in the experience, reflect on strengths and areas for future growth, and learn how to articulate academic and foundational skills to employers. Foundational skills include; communication, creativity and innovation, problem solving, adaptability and collaboration.

This is a course description from the UCalgary Academic Calendar. 

What worked well?

Giving students multiple opportunities to practice the skills before the assessment worked well, especially when they collaborated in groups and structured their responses to match the required prompt.

What challenges did you encounter?

The instructor often needed to return papers for revision because students did not follow the instructions.

How might students redo/try out or apply these skills in future opportunities?

The instructor expects that students will apply these skills in future interview situations.

• Format for reflection: Written reflection
• Graded: Yes

Sample reflection prompt

"Students are asked how the activity will influence their approach to future interviews and to identify a specific step they can take moving forward."

The most valuable learning in this activity happens in the back and forth: students hearing how peers approach the same question, giving feedback, and immediately trying again. Live polling makes this learning visible. When students rate their expected performance before the exercise and their actual performance after, the gap is consistently significant, and presenting those results in real time becomes a teaching moment in itself. Students discover they are more capable than they anticipated, and that capability grows with practice. Closing the session by having students articulate one significant learning and one intentional change converts an energizing experience into a concrete plan.

Advice for those seeking to try this activity

• Invest preparation time in teaching what a good answer looks like: its components and why each matters. If you can only do one preparatory element well, make it this one. Pair it with clear exemplars so students understand expectations before they begin.
• Let students practice with people they know. Assign the exercise within pre-existing class groups (groups of five to six subdividing into twos and threes), since interviewing in front of strangers is unnecessarily nerve-racking at this stage of skill development.
• Assign rotating roles of interviewer, interviewee, and observer, with the observer also keeping time.
• Structure the session in rounds with whole-class debriefs between them. Assign the first two questions yourself, then open the final round to student-devised questions for variety.
• Collect before and after self-ratings and closing reflections using a free tool such as Microsoft Forms, and present the results live as they arrive. Be prepared to work with whatever the results show.
• Grade for genuine participation in the activity plus completion of the closing reflection, rather than for interview performance itself.

• Ash, S. L., & Clayton, P. H. (2009). Generating, deepening, and documenting learning: The power of critical reflection in applied learning. Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education, 1, 25-48. (Foundation for the DEAL(ER) reflection model used in the course.)
• Nilson, L. B. (2015). Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time. Stylus Publishing. (Assessment approach for this activity.)
• University of Calgary Career Services interview preparation resources: https://ucalgary.ca/career-personal-development/advising/job-search-resources/interviews