I believe that if someone decides to run for moderator, he should have at least approximate idea what will be expected from them.
We can learn something about work of moderators here: http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/9323/mse-and-meta-mse-as-seen-by-moderators
I would be interested whether moderators have some recommendations about things that might be useful for a user thinking about becoming a moderator. I have in mind some things that a non-mod can do and that are similar or closely related to the actions requested from moderators. (This could be considered as a kind of "training" for moderator position.)
For example, I could imagine something along the lines:
- You should read both meta and meta.SE frequently. Once you become a mod, you will spend a lot of time there.
You should try to handle flags that are available to 10k+ users and learn to deal with them correctly. Handling flags will be an important part of your moderating.(10k flag queue seems to be removed now, see here for details.)
(Of course, these examples are only hypothetical. I have never been a moderator at a SE site, so I cannot really give any reasonable recommendations about things like this.)