Arctic Shores pilot assessment: what to expect

What the Arctic Shores assessment measures

Arctic Shores is a recruitment-technology company whose assessments work differently from a traditional pilot aptitude test. Instead of right-or-wrong questions, it uses what it calls task-based assessment: a set of short interactive tasks that capture how you behave, then scores that behaviour.

Arctic Shores frames what it measures in two parts, personality and what it calls Workplace Intelligence, its take on cognitive ability, and says it captures thousands of data points from how you approach the tasks rather than what you say about yourself. It reports on behavioural qualities such as how you respond to change, handle challenges, work with numbers, identify patterns and make decisions. There is no single correct answer to memorise.

The point of the task-based approach is that it reads behaviour as it happens rather than asking you to rate yourself, which sidesteps the tendency in a traditional questionnaire to pick the answer you think an employer wants. Arctic Shores says most candidates find the tasks engaging, which it links to unusually high completion rates. For a pilot cadet scheme, that means the stage is looking for a genuine behavioural fit with the role rather than a rehearsed set of responses.

How the Arctic Shores assessment is structured

The assessment arrives as an email invitation from the employer and takes around forty-five minutes, with a practice task first and roughly nine tasks in all, with breaks between them.

Rather than a pass mark, Arctic Shores produces a single fit number, from one to a hundred, ranking a candidate against a benchmark the employer has set for what good looks like in that role. Because it measures behaviour rather than knowledge, there is deliberately nothing to revise in the usual sense, and the score reflects patterns across the whole session rather than any one task.

The tasks are interactive and run in a browser on a desktop or a mobile device, so a modern, well-charged device and a stable connection matter. Because the benchmark is set per employer and per role, the same profile can be a strong fit for one scheme and a weaker fit for another, which is why there is no universal score to chase.

Who uses Arctic Shores

In airline cadet selection, the clearest documented user is Jet2's FlightPath cadet-pilot scheme, which uses an Arctic Shores task-based assessment as an early cognitive and behavioural stage, corroborated by applicant accounts and Jet2's own candidate guidance.

Arctic Shores' wider client base is mostly outside aviation, and it does not publish an airline case study of its own, so beyond Jet2 you should confirm with the specific scheme whether Arctic Shores is part of its process rather than assume from another airline's example.

SkyStudy is independent and not affiliated with any airline, school or test publisher named in this section. Operator usage changes between intakes and is rarely confirmed publicly, so always verify the current selection process in the operator's own published materials.

How to prepare for Arctic Shores, honestly

Arctic Shores' own candidate guidance is refreshingly plain: you cannot really revise for a behavioural assessment, so preparation is about doing yourself justice. Complete the practice task, read the instructions carefully, and do the assessment in one sitting in a quiet, distraction-free place with notifications off. Use a reasonably modern device on a stable connection and make sure it is charged.

Above all, approach the tasks in the way that feels natural to you rather than trying to guess a right personality, because the assessment is built to read genuine behaviour. The most useful thing you can practise is composure and focus: SkyStudy's situational-judgement and self-report exercises below let you get comfortable with reflective, behaviour-style questions.

Sources

Facts on this page are drawn from the following, checked July 2026. Details change, so confirm current specifics with the publisher or your assessment provider.

• Arctic Shores, how it works
• Arctic Shores, candidate guidance

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