What you need to know about the Cabin Crew Psychometric Tests

There’s something uniquely nerve-wracking about the written selection tests in cabin crew recruitment. Not all airlines use them, but for the ones that do, these tests are usually Numerical (maths) and Verbal Reasoning. Verbal Reasoning is not about your English language proficiency; it is about how you use language in a logical way i.e. whether you can make accurate inferences or identify facts based on the information supplied. A good grasp of English is needed to do yourself justice in these tests.

Overall performance

If your performance on these tests worries you, you need to make sure you excel in other areas on your selection day. Sometimes if recruiters are really impressed by you in other areas they may be more flexible about your weaker areas. So make sure your interview answers are very strong with very clear examples of how you work and what sort of person you are. Make sure you are prepared to shine in any group exercises or roleplays- if you haven’t been on our cabin crew course at Heathrow you should consider it as this will help you demonstrate the best version of yourself you are capable of.

Tips to improve

Improving your verbal and numerical reasoning skills does requires time and effort. You can however also look for opportunities in your everyday life to challenge yourself in this skill area. For instance:

• Complete timed problem solving exercises and puzzles in newspapers and puzzle books
• Before you make a decision, stop and think about whether you have sufficient information to make a logical rather than intuitive decision.
• Don’t always go with your first decision – force yourself to think of other alternatives before proceeding.
  Learn how to skim documents quickly to extract the key information; you can do this on websites, magazines, documents you may use at work, like policies or procedure notes.
• Build up your reading speed by setting yourself daily reading goals and measuring your performance eg how many pages of a book you can read (taking it all in) in 15 minutes. You will see your speed improve, which means in your tests you will be able to complete more of the questions.
• Stay away from the calculator! Whether it’s adding up your shopping as you go or working out your share of a dinner bill, try to use your brain and not your phone to do the calculation. It’s a good habit to keep your brain agile and able to work out maths questions quickly.
• If you decide to use our workbook to get some practice, don’t get demoralised if you don’t seem to be getting many right to start with. You may need to learn to see what the different types of questions are looking for before you start getting correct answers.
• Most of these tests are multiple choice, so the more questions you answer, the more chance you have of getting them right. You may need to guess some answers, but with multiple choice answers you have a one in 4 chance of being correct!

Practice does help

Warm up your brain on all the different types of testing using our Ability Tests Workbook. It was designed to help cabin crew candidates and has plenty of questions to work through- plus the answers so you can see where you are right and wrong.

The very best way to get ready for doing the tests is to take practice ones.

Scoring

It’s worth remembering that you don’t have to do hugely well on these types of tests to get an ok score. There will be a baseline score which you need to exceed but it’s usually pretty generous; there’s certainly no need to get everything right. So try to relax about it, and take the advice above to make sure you have equipped yourself as well as you can to do your personal best.