Negotiation Simulation

Say the number. That is the hard rule, and it is the only rule this tutorial enforces without discussion: before you leave, you will have said a specific figure aloud, to a person whose face is doing something in response, at least once. Not a range you retreat into. A number.

The reason is narrow and practical. The negotiation flinch is a motor habit, not a knowledge gap — you already know the number, and you have probably read three articles about saying it. Reading about it does not touch the half-second where your voice goes up at the end. Repetition does.

How the rounds run#

Your convenor plays the other side, badly at first and then properly. Four rounds, six minutes each, rotating who is in the chair while the rest of the room watches the flinch happen to somebody else, which is instructive in a way watching it happen to you never is.

Round one is the number. Round two is the number after a pause you do not fill. Round three is everything other than money, because at entry level that is where most of the actual movement lives. Round four is the decline.

Each stream negotiates what is genuinely open in its field, which is not the same list:

• Technical Practice — scope, level, which team, and the expectations attached to a take-home, including how many unpaid hours it assumes.
• Creative and Communications Practice — rates, usage rights, and refusing an unpaid test brief. Usage rights are where entry-level people lose the most and know about it the least.
• Commercial and Public Practice — start date, rotation preference and grad-stream choice, plus learning to identify the bands that are genuinely fixed by policy so you spend your ask on something that can move.

Declining without burning the contact#

The fourth round is the one students say they did not expect to need and later say they used first. A decline is a message you will send to someone who may hire you in three years: it is prompt, it names the decision as yours, it gives one honest non-insulting reason, and it does not invent a competing offer that does not exist. Then it stops. Most burnt contacts are burnt by the fourth paragraph, not the first.

This morning’s guest relay gave you three practitioners telling you what they wish candidates had asked. Today you ask it, out loud, to someone who can answer back.

Leaving with#

Dossier §11: one negotiation script, one decline script, and the question set you will actually use — each written as sentences you can say, not notes about sentences you might say.