How to Pass the Amazon MBA Online Assessment and Get the Internship

Competition for Amazon’s MBA program has been becoming fiercer over recent years. More and more candidates are competing for every spot in the internship program.

The candidate assessment for the program is challenging, including both a work simulation test and custom Amazon personality tests.

If you want to succeed in this Amazon assessment test and get into an Amazon MBA Internship, learning and preparation is a must. The best way to succeed is to practice for the questions, as well as gain a full understanding of the type of candidate that Amazon needs.

Amazon MBA Online Assessment

Taking The Amazon Assessment Test? Learn how you can boost your score and overscore the competition.

Table of Contents

What Is the MBA Online Assessment?

Amazon makes use of its MBA Online Assessment as the first stage for screening candidates for its internship program.

Instead of focusing on the candidate’s cognitive skills, the test instead focuses on their personality characteristics and work traits.

The assessment can be completed in approximately 80 minutes. Each candidate may complete the MBA Online Assessment only once in a given recruiting cycle.

What to Expect?

During this assessment, you will be tested on your personality, behavior, and judgment. At first glance, the questions may appear less challenging than the mathematical or economics questions that you’ve seen as an MBA student, but not all is as it seems.

Unlike in a mathematics test, there’s no single right or wrong answer – but there are answers that fit Amazon’s workplace culture, and answers that don’t.

Below you will see a brief guide to the sort of questions you will see in the MBA Online Assessment

Work Simulation Test

The Work Simulation Test should be viewed as the most important part of the overall assessment.

In this test, you’re faced with real-world workplace issues. Imagine you’re the manager responsible for an Alexa update.

The new update is buggy, but the manager wants you to roll it out regardless of the problems. What would you do in this situation?

In the MBA Online Assessment, you would see questions that include opinions from different team members, as well as some data (for example, how time consuming would it be to correct bugs in the existing software versus developing a new version).

You would have to rank the information between most important and least important.

Practice for the Amazon MBA Online Assessment

Work Simulation Example Question

work simulation sample question

Once again, getting the answers right in these scenarios is key to passing the assessment.

To get it right, you must demonstrate both judgment and leadership skills. To do this, you should make use of Amazon’s leadership principles.

Learn as much as you can about the 16 Leadership Principles, so you can answer the questions as if you were the ideal manager Amazon wants.

You can take an Amazon Practice Test to familiarise yourself with the test structure.

Workstyle Assessment

This is a behavioral test that most applicants for Amazon positions have to pass.

While you may have heard there is “no right or wrong answer” for the test, you can easily understand that this is not quite true.

why would Amazon even include this test if there was no right or wrong answer?

The workstyle assessment is used to evaluate candidates for MBA manager positions: Product, finance and retail managers, or something else. Each applicant must demonstrate they are compatible with Amazon’s workplace culture.

Here is a sample question:

work-style-assessment ranking question

The question does not have a “neutral” answer. This is actually a very good thing, always trying to remain neutral is a bad trait for a potential leader.

Once again, the best way to answer questions from this section is to be familiar with the Amazon Leadership Principles.

These are values that every Amazon employee is expected to take very seriously. It’s unsurprising, then, that the behavioral test is intended to select candidates based on these principles too!

Beyond just studying the Leadership Principles themselves, you should also learn about the personality questions that are used in the Workstyle Assessment and its structure.

Work Priorities Survey and MBA Role Preference Survey

These are two different surveys based on a similar concept.

The Work Priorities Survey requires that the candidate rank their interests in different work settings, between 1 and 5.

This is easy. For example, candidates who want to get into the HR Leadership program should state that they are “very interested” in recruitment tasks.

The Role Preferences Survey directly requests that the candidates select the roles they want and rank them from “most” to “least”.

The best way to complete these surveys is to look up information online about the different positions and decide beforehand what positions you are interested in.

Other MBA Jobs Using the Assessment

Amazon uses the same test to screen candidates for a variety of MBA positions:

  • Senior Product Manager (PM).
  • Senior Product Manager (technical products) (PMT).
  • Senior Program Manager (PGM).
  • Pathways Operations Management (Ops).
  • CloudPath Infrastructure Manager (CP).
  • HR Leadership Development Program (HRLDP).
  • Finance Leadership Development Program (FLDP).
  • Retail Leadership Development Program (RLD).