How Can Mock Interview Help IT Bootcamps?

IT bootcamps are essential services for many seeking a new career in the IT field. They help candidates boost their knowledge and capabilities in a short time.

While such training adds much to a candidate, it may not always be enough. After graduation, anyone will  always experience a hard period of applications and interviews. The most decisive element of the recruitment process is the interview. So, how a candidate performs during the interview does matter much.

As all challenging exams require serious preparation, recruitment interviews also require serious preparation. As bootcamps provide necessary technical skills, a mock interview appears to be the most efficient way of preparing candidates.

Challenges To Overcome

Experiencing an interview is a real challenge for candidates. As the barriers faced are not one-dimensional, there are several challenges that such a candidate has to overcome.

The Strongest Enemy: Nervousness and Amygdala Hijack

The worst case scenario occurs when a candidate experiences amygdala hijack. Amygdala hijack simply is a term to explain when your emotions dictate you to conduct a fight-or-flight response. In such situations, a person can not think and act logically, as the emotions take over the management. For a candidate in an interview, that means a total failure. 

However, most of the time emotions will not drive a person through amygdala hijacking. High amount of nervousness is a more common phenomenon for interviews. Even though a little bit of that helps candidates to be successful, higher nervousness is not easy to control. In such situations, since a candidate will not be able to relay his or her knowledge as it should be, he or she will probably fail.

Mock interviews provide a way to overcome such situations. During an amygdala hijack, our brains utilize automatic behaviors. Rehearsal in a near-real-world environment helps to improve alternative ways besides fight-or-flight response. That is also valid for the nervousness problem.

The Problem Of Observer Effect

Recent scientific research, one of which is known as double-slit experiment, shows that observation of quantum phenomena can change the measured results. Similar findings also exist in results of social research. So, there is a common rule that if there is an observer, the measurement results will change.

This rule also plays a role during interviews. Since a candidate gets observed, results of the measurement gets affected, as his or her behavior does, too.

As the observation effect is about emotions within human context, improving the results is possible. Simply, a person should learn how to get over the effects of the observation pressure by getting used to it. In other words, rehearsal of interviews can help to improve a candidate’s capacity to relay information about himself or herself.

The Best Tool For Improvement: Mock Interviews

While a bootcamp provides substantial training for building IT knowledge, that is not enough for a candidate to win an application interview. After a heavy period of training, candidates strive to find a job. Most of them can not be able to get a good job for a long time since they do not have the necessary skills yet. This affects the perception of the quality of a bootcamp negatively.

Mock interviews are structured and specifically designed methods of training for overcoming aforementioned problems. Most of the time, a mock interview can be the best intervention, in fact.

While some bootcamps have career services in their curriculum, some other do not. The mock interview application may not be utilized enough even by the bootcamps which have such career services. The importance of mock interviews is significant for building a person’s new career path. Therefore, bootcamps should think of utilizing mock interviews. By doing so, such a bootcamp can improve its success rates and perception by others, as well as adding to its candidates’ new life much.