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What we are looking for in our Graduates

We are looking for graduates to train as Research Executives at GfK NOP. Executives are absolutely vital to our business, with responsibility for understanding what our clients want and designing, implementing and presenting surveys that will meet those client needs. For more information on what the role entails, have a look at the ‘Day in the Life’ section later on in this document.

Successful Executives need a variety of skills – communication and inter-personal skills generally, numeracy, literacy, logical thinking and good organisational abilities.

We do not have any fixed rules on what subject you should have studied but we would expect a good 2nd Class Honours degree (or equivalent). Previous graduates have studied a wide range of courses including Psychology, English, Modern Languages, History, Geography, Business Studies, Marketing, Sociology, Mathematics and Economics. A knowledge of statistics or statistical methods is not essential, but facility with figures and the ability to make logical inferences from statistical data are important.

Specifically we seek candidates who can demonstrate:

Excellent written English skills

You will need to be able to take on the role of technical author, in varying styles suitable for respondents (in questionnaire compilation), for colleagues (in setting down requirements to interviewers, and production and analysis departments) and for clients (in reporting and proposal writing).

Good organisational abilities

You will need to design and carry out projects, so that they meet the prerequisites of quality, timely delivery and profitability.

Strong inter-personal skills

You will need to be decisive, convincing, and professionally impressive in order to persuade clients to entrust you with their work, and to take your considered advice or accept your conclusions; and you will need to be able to coax the best efforts out of interviewers and production staff who do not have the benefit of knowing the full background to a project.

Clear, logical thought

You will need, without necessarily understanding the complexities of data processing, to hold in your mind a clear path though the mass of data that can be generated by even small surveys, in order to tease out the particularly meaningful parts; and to perceive in advance which pieces of information need to be collected from which sub-groups within a surveyed population, in order to provide that pathway when the questionnaire you design is ultimately analysed.

We obviously do not expect these attributes to be perfectly ‘honed’ from day one, but we need to see evidence that you can aspire to them!