Yesterday I got a call from a company I sent a resume to weeks ago. They wanted to know if I was still interested in the NOC Engineer position I applied for and asked me to take a Skills Assessment as part of the pre-interview process. I agreed and set up an appointment for Friday morning at 11AM.

I got to their office a little after 11, and the receptionist handed me the test. Three pages, ~15 questions, multiple choice. The woman on the phone said it should take me about 15 minutes. The receptionist led me to an empty conference room and I sat down with the test while she walked back to her desk.

The test was on basic things a network engineer should know. One question had a list of services/protocols and a list of port numbers and I was to draw lines to match up which services were on which ports.

Some questions were more interesting, like "Choose all that apply. Which of the following are displayed after running the command 'ipconfig' on a Windows computer."

Some were rudimentary. "A customer says they can receive email but cannot send mail. What would you have them check?" with possible options "POP Settings" "SMTP Settings" "DNS Settings" and others.

I finished the test in about five minutes and brought it back out to the receptionist. She said she would scan it in and send it to the hiring manager, mentioning that they recently filled a position but like to have someone in the pipeline to be able to fill a position quickly.

I do not have high expectations for this job turning out (especially since I haven't had an interview yet).