How do you like to prioritize your work when everything seems to be equally urgent?
No matter what role you are being considered for at Fonterra, it's important to know that the daily life there is action-packed and full of many duties. To find out more about your ability to handle multiple tasks and projects with ease and success, it will be important for your interviewer to understand how you prioritize and tackle your work when you have competing priorities.
"For me, prioritizing work comes down to a few different things. First and foremost, it is keeping myself organized and keeping track of important deadlines on my calendar. I can break projects up into milestones and set aside time to ensure I'm meeting those. Each day as a reliability engineer is filled with fires that need to be put out. When I have myself organized with other long-term work, I have enough time each day to work on the quick things that inevitably arise. This ensures that floor staff and production are never held up. This would be the same approach I take to my work here at Fonterra."
"I have always organized my work based on the overall urgency and time required for the project. This information often comes with guidance from my management team. I keep a 'to-do' list of what I need to accomplish before the end of the day, and I never leave until I have checked off every item on my list. It sounds like Fonterra's next electrician will be responsible for multiple production and packaging plants and I know that I will be relied upon to be responsible to prioritize tasks when multiple things come up on a busy night shift."
If possible, try to answer this question with real-life work situations where you had a big workload with many priorities. This can include one of those days when it seemed that every task was taking your attention or a time when you were facing multiple deadlines. You'll want to walk your interviewer through your process of tackling each duty and your thought process on how you went about it. They'll be keying in on your ability to prioritize, organize, and ensure that no job goes undone. Show the interviewer that you have a thoughtful system in place to help you better prioritize, making you a highly valuable and productive member of the Fonterra team.
