Work Ready series · Module 1

Problem Solving at Work

Employers keep saying the same thing: school and college leavers can do the task, but freeze when the task goes wrong. This is what "going wrong" actually looks like, and what a good response to it looks like.

You'll work through one real situation. There is no single right answer. You'll be scored on how you think, not on guessing what we want to hear.

Time: about 8 minutes For: Years 10–13 and college Works: on any device, no login

The situation

Saturday, 8:40am

You work weekends at a garden centre. You're booked on the café till, 9 til 1. The doors open in twenty minutes.

You check the rota on the staff room wall and notice four things:

You and Dev are both written down for café till, 9 til 1.
Nobody at all is written down for the plants section, 9 til 1.
Sam, who normally covers plants, rang in sick yesterday afternoon.
Ruth, your supervisor, isn't in until 11. The café rush starts at 10.

Dev has just walked in, seen the same rota, and pulled a face.

Step 1 · Name the problem

What is the actual problem here?

Not the first annoying thing you noticed. The thing that will cause damage if nobody deals with it.

Step 2 · Weigh the options

It's 8:45. You have three realistic options.

All three are things real people do. Each one costs you something. Pick the one you'd actually go with.

Step 3 · Live with the consequence

What happens next

The debrief

What a manager would have done

Ruth has done this job for eleven years. Here is how she'd have read the same rota, in about forty seconds.

1. She'd have looked past the clash

Two names on one line is the eye-catching bit. It isn't the expensive bit. The expensive bit is an empty line: plants, unstaffed, on a Saturday, with the sick note already in. A double-booking wastes one person. An empty section loses sales and annoys customers for four hours.

2. She'd have moved the person, not the problem

She has two people and two jobs. That's not a crisis, it's an allocation. She'd send whoever knows plants best, and if neither of you does, she'd send whoever can be talked through it fastest and keep the stronger till operator where the money goes through.

3. She'd have made a record before she made a coffee

This is the bit people your age consistently skip, and it's the bit that gets you trusted with more. A one-line message, "Rota clash, plants empty, Dev's gone to plants, I'm on till, call me if you want it swapped", takes eleven seconds and does three things: it tells Ruth, it protects you both if something goes wrong in plants, and it stops her arriving at 11 to a surprise.

4. She'd have accepted an imperfect answer at 8:55

None of your options were clean. Waiting for a perfect instruction while the doors open is itself a decision, and usually the worst one. Employers don't expect you to be right. They expect you to choose, tell someone, and be able to explain why.

The takeaway: good problem solving at work is rarely clever. It's noticing what actually costs money or upsets people, choosing between imperfect options, and telling the right person what you did.

Your reflection log

Three questions, your words

This is the bit that goes in your CV, your application form and your interview answers. Nobody sees it but you. Print it or copy it out and keep it.

1. What was the real problem, in one sentence? And how was it different from the first thing you noticed?

2. What did your choice cost? Every option gave something up. What did yours give up?

3. When have you done this in real life? School, sport, home, a job, a group project. A time you fixed something by changing who was doing what, rather than just working harder. This is your interview answer. Write it properly.

Module complete

That's the taster

0

What you decided

The full Work Ready set

Eight scenarios, same structure, roughly an hour in total. Built to sit on your school or college site or intranet, no logins, no pupil data collected.

The double-booked shift (this one, free)
The customer who is only partly wrong
The delivery is late and you have to decide who to tell first
The kit fails mid-shift and there's no manager on site
Two supervisors, two different instructions
A task nobody trained you for
Something's gone wrong and it was your fault
Three weeks of complaints, one pattern

For staff: supports Gatsby Benchmarks 1, 4 and 6, and the September 2026 work experience requirement for Years 7–9 activities. Self-contained HTML, WCAG 2.1 AA, SCORM 1.2 and 2004 compatible, and it runs perfectly well with no LMS at all.

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