Irish Rail Jobs Discussion

They'll send you practice material. They're exactly the type of test you'll get when you go to Inchicore.

Nice one, hope they went well for you, I'm going on Monday myself. Do they give you any kind of feedback on the day or is it an up and leave and wait situation?

Ah nice one, thank you

The tests are tough, did mine the other day. The report writing one is ok, the dials one would be ok if you had time which you don't. The memory test one is a bastard though. I'd question how applicable that test is to any job, better to have someone who refers to a procedure or checklist than someone who can learn off tiny details in a few minutes. Because no matter how good their memory is, they'll screw up at some point if they're relying on it to that extent.

Having done the tests and now being in the job, your short term memory is used every single minute. Procedures and checklists are only applicable at the very start of your working day and during an emergency

The memory test is cognitive overload. You are presented with new to you passages of plain text with probably 100+ details in them, from key colours to job titles, cupboard names, form references, blue rectangles, opening times of offices and lots of other details. The details seem arbitrary.

You get a few minutes to take all of this in which means you can't brute force it into memory. You are then asked questions which are designed to catch you out. As you say, easy enough to rule out one or two of the answers but after that, very difficult. You know its not the red rectangle but was it the large blue rectangle or the small blue one?

I have multiple STEM degrees and a very good LC and that test is one of the hardest things I've ever done. IMO 50% would be a brilliant score. Unless the candidate already had some sort of edge e.g. if those passages of text were reflective of actual practices in rail transport and the person was familiar with those, then they would have a major edge.

Yeah totally agree mate!

Just got the invite as well, happy to see others getting the good news 😀

You obviously did better than expected, I was sure the report writing the notes would have gotten me since I couldn't hear the man speaking with his accent.

No Clue on how many will have been cut I'd guess with 3 phases and a medical maybe around 20% per round but then it depends on how many started and how many they want

Vast majority of applications don’t make it past the intial online assessment. If your getting to the pen and paper stage your doing really well.

the practice material questions aren’t on the actual in person test. Examples given are similar but not the same. But if you practice the material they sent you, you should be fine. Everyone’s in the same boat.

It is computers, you'll do two separate tests and then do them together on the same screen at the same time.

Then you'll do the written SCAAT again but with symbols instead of letters

The email says there are four tests:

Visual Search Exercise (practice material says this is a computer based test (see page 32))

IE LD SJT verification (not specifically mentioned in the current practice material but given the initial version of this was on computer from home, I wouldn't be surprised if it's also on computer)

SCAAT (practice material says this is a computer based test(see page 24))

Pre-Interview Form (no mention of paper or computer)

Read the PDF attachment, c9859 Irish Rail Driver 2020 PTMs Question Booklet (Updated July 2020).pdf, page numbers referring in my last post.