Work and Study
Practise answering everyday questions about your job or studies, daily routines and colleagues, then discuss how the world of work is changing.
Easy · 1 attempt
Part 1 · Interview
4–5 minShort questions about you and your daily life. Pick a question to see the strategy and a sample answer.
Do you work or are you a student?
How to answer
Give a direct answer in the present simple, then add one or two details about your role or course; avoid reciting your whole CV.
Sample answer
I'm working at the moment — I'm a junior accountant at a logistics company in my city. I joined about two years ago, just after finishing my degree, so I still feel quite new. Most of my week is spent preparing invoices and monthly reports, which sounds dry, but I actually enjoy the rhythm of it.
Part 2 · Cue card
3–4 minCue card
Describe a job you would like to do in the future.
You should say:
What the job is and what kind of work it involves
How you first became interested in this job
What skills or qualifications you would need to do it
And explain why you would like to do this job in the future.
Strategy
Choose one concrete job and stick with it; switching between two options halfway through wastes your two minutes.
Use future and conditional forms throughout — 'I'd be designing', 'it would involve' — since this job hasn't happened yet.
Anchor the abstract topic with one real remembered moment, such as the first time you saw someone doing this job.
Save your strongest reason for the final bullet and signal it clearly with a phrase like 'but the main reason is'.
Model answer
The job I'd really like to do in the future is user experience design — basically, designing apps and websites so they're simple and even enjoyable to use. A UX designer spends their time sketching screens, testing ideas with real users, and working with developers to fix whatever turns out to be confusing. It's a strange mix of psychology, drawing and problem-solving, which is exactly what appeals to me. I first became interested almost by accident. A couple of years ago, my company introduced new accounting software that was so badly designed that half my team refused to use it. I remember thinking, someone got paid to make this, and they clearly never watched an actual accountant try to use it. I started reading articles about why software fails, discovered there was a whole profession devoted to this, and I was hooked. Since then I've been doing a short online course in the evenings. In terms of what I'd need — there's no single qualification, which is encouraging, but I'd have to build a portfolio of design work, learn the standard tools properly, and get much better at interviewing users without leading them. Patience and curiosity apparently matter more than artistic talent, and I'd like to think I have plenty of both. And the reason I want this job so much is that it would let me fix the kind of everyday frustration I see constantly in my current work. There's something satisfying about the idea of making thousands of strangers' days slightly smoother. Plus, honestly, I'd love a career where I create things rather than just check them.
Part 3 · Discussion
4–5 minDeeper follow-up questions on the part 2 themes.
How has technology changed the kinds of jobs people do?
How to answer
Organise your answer into 'jobs lost' and 'jobs created'; the present perfect with past-to-present framing works well here.
Sample answer
Quite dramatically, I'd say. On the one hand, a lot of routine work — bank tellers, typists, certain factory roles — has either disappeared or shrunk, because machines simply do it cheaper. On the other hand, whole professions exist now that nobody had heard of twenty years ago: app developers, data analysts, social media managers. What strikes me most, though, is how technology has changed surviving jobs from the inside — a farmer today might spend as much time looking at sensor data as at the actual fields. So it's less about replacement and more about transformation.