Practising

Practice in Beacon is written from the job ad and your CV, not from a bank of questions. Every answer is marked out of ten on four things, with what would raise the mark.

Every job ad you check comes with one short practice, free: five set questions plus follow-ups, in about fifteen minutes. It is aimed at the must-haves your CV does not show.

Start it from the job page with Practise this job ad, then Start the short practice. Nothing needs pasting: the job already has your CV, the job ad, your level and the type of role.

Once you have had it, the job says so. Check another job ad and another one is waiting.

The questions are in the job ad's language when it is English, Romanian or Hungarian, and in English otherwise.

Each question shows its number and its category. Type your answer the way you would say it. The answer is saved as you write, so Pause and save lets you come back later.

With Coach you can also Record instead: Beacon transcribes the recording and marks it the same way. Your browser asks for the microphone first, and you can refuse.

A follow-up is written from your answer, not from the job ad. A thin answer gets a question that exposes it, and a specific one gets a question that builds on it.

When you finish, Your results shows your average answer out of ten, which of the job ad's requirements your answers showed, what to do next, and every answer with the weakest first.

Open an answer for the criteria behind its mark, and normally an excellent answer to compare with.

When an answer shows something your CV does not say, it becomes a line you can add to your CV. Chapter 3 covers that.

Each answer is marked out of ten on four things:

• it answers the question asked
• a specific example of something you did
• a figure on the outcome
• a trade-off or a limitation

To raise it lists what was missing, with how to fix it. Already there lists the rest. Under them are the question, an excellent answer, and yours.

Say the specifics. "I led the migration" is a weak answer. "The reconciliation took eighty seconds, and the query plan showed a full table scan" is a strong one. The difference is a number, a decision and a consequence.

With Coach, the plan has three kinds of practice:

• Focused: one question on each plan item not yet Confident, five at most.
• Drill: one item, three questions, about five minutes.
• Refresher: your two weakest items, for the evening before.

For a job ad in Romanian or Hungarian you can practise in that language or in English. You can type each answer, or record it.

After a plan practice, What this practice moved shows each plan item whose status changed, with its mark. See every answer, marked walks through the answers in order.

With Coach you can also take a full practice: ten to twenty-five questions and the follow-ups they prompt, in about an hour. A full practice is built from the whole job ad and your CV, not only the gaps. Coach has no fixed limit on them.

Practice, at the top of every page, lists every practice across every job, with the ones still running first. Continue picks one up where you left it, and See the marking opens a finished one.

Progress charts your own practice once you have finished one: how many you have done and your average score, your Score over time, and Work on these first, sorted by how many points each weakness has cost you. A line needs three practices.