Adaptability

Your ability to adjust to new environments and conditions, and your role in the situation.

Explore your understanding

Having the ability to respond to the circumstances around you and manage any changes effectively is a key component of adaptability. 

Being able to show that you are able to, or willing to, make changes in response to the environment is a skill that can support you with your achievements.

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Find and develop your skill

 How can you improve your adaptability skills at UCL? 
There is a lot of support here to help you develop this skill!

• Employer–led Skills Session:
  Take part in a Employer-led mock assessment centre where you can take part in activities such as looking at case studies. You may be asked to take part in a session that changes its priorities at certain points requiring you to adapt your approach to the task.
  
  Visit myUCLCareers for upcoming events
   
• Innovation and Enterprise:
  Learn more about adaptability and attend a 2 day boot camp. Here you will find out how to adapt these skills and apply them to employment opportunities such as roles requiring project management and problem solving.
   

• Students' Union UCL:
  Join a club or society within the Students’ Union. Be part of a committee where you may find that you can develop your adaptability skills by transitioning into a new role and having to balance multiple tasks and priorities at the same time. They also offer a great range of workshops open to all students.

• Go Abroad:
  UCL Go Abroad programmes encompass an enriching selection of worldwide opportunities tailored to support UCL students to perform at their full potential and further develop their adaptability skills. Attend an event to learn more about the global opportunities available both short term and longer term as part of your degree.

Postgraduate Researchers:

• UCL Doctoral Skills Development Training Programe (UCL Doc Skills):
  The UCL Doc Skills Programme is open to all postgraduate research students at UCL. Here postgraduate researchers will be able to access courses related to adaptability to further develop skills within this area. You’ll find more information on all the courses available on our website. 
  
  You will also be able to browse the scheduled events for researchers and those for doctoral students.  Research students can also access courses mapped to the Researcher Development Framework (RDF). 

UCL Careers Opportunities:

There are many different opportunities here at UCL Careers that can help you develop your adaptability.

Apply for a work experience, UK Internship or Global Internship where you have the opportunity to adapt to a new location, environment, working culture, general culture and language.

Prepare your examples

Assessment Centres are often where employers look for evidence of your adaptability skills. This could be during a team task or group activity where you may have to respond to changes in a task as quickly and easily as possible.

Describe a situation in which you were assigned a new task. How did you respond to this situation?

Can you talk about a time you had to do something you had never done before? How did you approach this situation, and what did you learn?

Think about a big change that you have had to deal with? How did you adapt to that change?

Need some support on how to structure your answer relating to adaptability  for an interview?
Visit our Interviews Skills page.

Here you can find out more about how to structure your answer and demonstrate your skills along with many more resources that will help you prepare.

If you have written a draft application for any type of opportunity, our team can provide personalised practical tips and advice to help you better understand how recruiters will shortlist your application, and how you can best demonstrate your motivation and your most relevant skills / experience.