Somewhere in most assessment centre schedules sits a written exercise: a report, a briefing note, an email to a difficult stakeholder, or a summary of a messy document pack. It gets less attention than the case study and the interview, which is a mistake, because it is often the exercise where the marking is most mechanical and the easiest to gain ground on with preparation.
What employers use it to test
Every organisation runs on written communication: emails that get acted on, briefings that get decisions made, reports that do not need a follow-up meeting to explain. The written exercise tests whether you can produce that under normal working conditions, which is to say with too little time and imperfect information.
Markers typically score four things:
- Clarity: can a busy reader extract your point in one pass?
- Structure: headings, ordering, and a beginning that says what the document is for.
- Judgement: did you include what matters and leave out what does not?
- Tone: appropriate for the stated audience, whether that is a director, a customer or a complainant.
Spelling and grammar matter at the margins, but a tidy document with no point loses to a slightly rough one that says something.
The common formats
The briefing note. You receive background papers and must brief a senior person before a meeting. The test is compression: what do they genuinely need to know, and in what order?
The recommendation report. Close cousin of the case study, but the emphasis is on the document rather than the analysis. Structure and evidence handling carry more weight than calculation.
The difficult email. A stakeholder is unhappy, a project is late, a decision will disappoint someone. The test is tone: firm, warm, specific, and never defensive.
The inbox or document sift. A pack of emails and attachments to triage into a summary of issues and actions. Related to the in-tray exercise, but marked as a piece of writing.
How to structure whatever they give you
You will not know the format in advance, but one skeleton adapts to nearly all of them:
- Purpose: one line saying what this document is and what it asks of the reader.
- The situation: two or three sentences of essential background, no more.
- The substance: findings, options or issues, in order of importance, under headings if longer than half a page.
- The ask: what happens next, who does it, by when.
Front-load ruthlessly. Senior readers read the first third properly and skim the rest; markers behave the same way. If your main point first appears in the final paragraph, it may as well not exist.
Handling the clock
Split the time before you start: roughly a quarter reading, a tenth planning, the rest writing, and a final few minutes rereading. The reread matters more here than in any other exercise, because written errors sit on the page in a way spoken stumbles do not.
If time runs short, do not speed up your prose; cut scope. Three points made cleanly beat five points half made. And never sacrifice the ending: a document without an ask is a description, and descriptions score poorly.
Tone traps
The written exercise is where otherwise strong candidates go strangely formal, producing sentences no human would say aloud. Write the way a capable colleague writes: plain words, short sentences, no throat-clearing. If the audience is a complainant or a customer, acknowledge the problem specifically before explaining anything, and make any apology concrete rather than institutional.
The opposite trap is casualness: contractions everywhere, exclamation marks, hedged apologies. Match the register to the stated reader, and when in doubt, err slightly formal but keep the words plain.
Practising it
The skill compounds quickly because the skeleton is reusable. Take any messy input (a long article, a set of meeting notes) and give yourself 20 minutes to produce a one-page briefing with the four-part structure above. Two or three rounds and the shape becomes automatic.
For the full experience under exam conditions, our mock assessment centre includes a timed written stage scored against assessor criteria, alongside the interview and presentation stages, so you can find your timing problems before the real day finds them for you.
If your centre also includes a case study, the two exercises reward overlapping skills: our case study guide covers the analytical half of the same coin.