Role Play Exercise Tips for Assessment Days
In a role play the other person is briefed to make it difficult. That is not adversarial, it is the only way to observe how you handle pressure.
A role play, sometimes called a one-to-one exercise, gives you a short brief and a fifteen minute conversation with a trained role player: an unhappy customer, an underperforming team member, a supplier in a dispute, a colleague cutting a corner. An assessor either observes or plays the part, and you are marked on the conversation itself.
The role player is working from a brief that specifies what they want, what they will concede and under what conditions, and often what they will escalate if you miss something. This is why your prep matters more than your acting. Somewhere in your pack is the piece of information that unlocks their position, and the conversations that go well are the ones where the candidate asks the question that surfaces it.
The competencies assessed are usually composure, empathy, questioning and problem solving, with integrity added where the scenario involves a rule being bent. The common trap is resolution at any cost: candidates under pressure promise a refund, a deadline or an exception they have no authority to give. The brief states your authority for a reason.
Role-Play Exercise scenarios you can practise
Each one is timed, set in a named sector and scored against an expert key, with AI feedback on the written answers. Sign up to play the free sample in full.
Role-Play: Difficult Client
A key client is unhappy about a missed deadline. Work through the conversation turn by turn, choosing how to respond, then draft a follow-up message.
Corporate & Business · 20 minutes
Role-Play: Managing Underperformance
A team member’s performance and reliability have recently dropped. Work through a supportive but honest 1:1 turn by turn, choosing how to respond, then draft a follow-up note summarising what was agreed.
Corporate & Business · 20 minutes
Role-Play: Supplier Negotiation
A supplier is pushing through a mid-contract price increase you consider excessive. Work through the negotiation turn by turn, choosing how to respond, then draft a follow-up email confirming the position.
Corporate & Business · 20 minutes
Role-Play: Challenging a Shortcut with Customer Data
The day before a board pack is due, you find a colleague’s churn model running on an unmasked copy of the customer table in a personal cloud notebook - and its headline accuracy comes from a split that leaks. Work through the conversation with a well-liked, twenty-year analyst turn by turn, then write the incident note.
Engineering · 20 minutes
Role-Play: Holding the Line on Release Quality
Your team’s release is due Friday, but regression tests are failing on the payment path and an unresolved authentication bug is awaiting security triage. Work through the conversation with a well-liked, fifteen-year delivery manager who needs you to mark it ready, then write the risk summary email to your tech lead.
Engineering · 20 minutes
Role-Play: Tidying the Client Report
Ahead of a renewal meeting, a charismatic senior associate wants the client’s annual report “tidied”: performance shown against a friendlier comparator and the fee breakdown moved out of sight. Work through the conversation turn by turn, then write the file note.
Finance & Banking · 20 minutes
Role-Play: Ministerial Pressure on the Numbers
The briefing pack for Thursday’s select-committee hearing is due at 17:00, and the Minister’s special adviser wants the pilot statistics to read more favourably: drop the small-sample caveat, lead with the one strong local figure, and lose the comparison year that looks bad. Work through the conversation turn by turn, then draft the revised caveat and a two-line file note.
Public Sector · 20 minutes
What the assessor is marking
Composure under pressure
Staying calm and professional while the other person is frustrated. Not passivity: assessors distinguish clearly between calm and conflict-avoidant.
Acknowledging the other person
Naming their concern before offering a solution. Candidates who jump to fixing usually get a second round of the same complaint, because the role player is briefed to repeat it until it is heard.
Questioning
Open questions that surface the information the brief is hiding. This is the most reliable route to a good outcome and the thing candidates most often skip.
Working within your authority
Being clear about what you can and cannot offer. Promising something the brief does not allow you to promise is a scored failure, even when it ends the conversation happily.
Reaching a workable next step
Most role plays do not have a clean resolution. Agreeing a concrete next step with a timescale and an owner is normally what a strong outcome looks like.
Integrity where it is tested
Scenarios involving a shortcut, a pressured number or a favour are integrity probes. Rationalising the shortcut caps that competency however smoothly the conversation went.
How to handle the conversation
- 1
Mine the brief for your limits
Before anything else, note what you can offer, what you cannot, and who you would escalate to. Those three facts prevent the most common scoring error in the exercise.
- 2
Open by establishing the purpose
One sentence on why you are both here and what you hope to reach. It steadies the conversation and gives you something to return to when it drifts.
- 3
Acknowledge first, solve second
Summarise their position back to them and check you have it right. It costs twenty seconds, defuses most of the heat, and it is explicitly credited.
- 4
Ask open questions and let them talk
Why, what happened, what would a good outcome look like for you. The role player is holding information that changes the problem, and questions are how it gets released.
- 5
Say what you can do, and what you cannot
Be explicit about the boundary and why it exists. Offering a smaller thing you can actually deliver scores better than a large thing you cannot.
- 6
Close with a concrete next step
Who does what, by when, and how you will follow up. Ending on sympathy alone leaves the problem-solving mark unclaimed.
- 7
Expect an escalation and stay level
Many briefs instruct the role player to push harder at the halfway point. Knowing it is scripted makes it much easier not to take personally.
Mistakes that cost marks
Over-promising to end the discomfort
The single most expensive error. Conceding beyond your authority is marked as poor judgement even though it makes the conversation easier.
Defending the organisation immediately
Explaining the policy before acknowledging the complaint guarantees the complaint returns. Acknowledge, then explain.
Talking for most of the conversation
A role play with a monologue in it has no questioning evidence. Aim to speak well under half the time.
Taking the hostility personally
The role player is following a brief. Treating the escalation as a personal attack is what turns a manageable scenario into a lost one.
Ignoring the integrity angle
Where the scenario involves a shortcut or a pressured figure, handling the relationship well while letting the issue pass caps the integrity competency.
Finishing with no agreement
A pleasant conversation that resolves nothing scores mid-range. Always land a next step, even a small one.
Practise it against the clock
Timed e-tray, in-tray, written, presentation, group and role-play scenarios, scored against an expert key with AI feedback on every written answer.
Frequently asked questions
Is the role player deliberately trying to make it hard?
They are following a brief that usually includes a position to hold, a concession they will make under specific conditions, and an escalation. It is not personal and it is not improvised, which is genuinely useful to know while it is happening.
Should I act, or be myself?
Be yourself in the role you have been given. Assessors are marking how you handle the conversation, not your performance, and candidates who play a character tend to drop it the moment the pressure rises.
What if I cannot resolve the situation?
Most role plays are not resolvable in fifteen minutes by design. A clear next step, an honest account of what you can and cannot do, and a calm conversation is a strong outcome.
Can I take notes into the role play?
Usually yes, and noting your authority and the two or three facts from the brief is worth doing. Reading from notes throughout the conversation is not.
Are role plays used outside customer-facing roles?
Yes. Management scenarios about underperformance, technical scenarios about release pressure or data handling, and public sector scenarios about pressure on published figures are all common.
How can I practise a role play on my own?
CogniPrep role-play scenarios run turn by turn: the character speaks, you choose how to respond, and each choice is scored against an expert key with a rationale, so you can see where composure, questioning or authority went wrong.
The rest of the assessment day
Assessment days rarely run one exercise in isolation. Most pair the exercises with an interview and an aptitude test, and many run a situational judgement test as part of the earlier sift. Our employer guides set out what specific companies run at each stage.