Vocbaulary for describing work experience for job interviews exercise
When you are writing a CV/resume or having a job interview, you will have to describe your previous or current work experience or background. So knowing professional vocabulary and phrases to do this is important.
When you talk about your work experience, you should always focus on the positive, never the negative. But even bad work experiences can be talked about if you use the correct professional vocabulary to make them sound like productive or beneficial experiences.
In this online exercise on decribing work experience, you will find both professional English vocabulary and an example of how to describe past work experience in English on both a CV/resume or in a job interview.
If you want to learn some more advanced vocabulary on work exerperience than what you find in the exercise below, I recommend that you do our exercise on 'describing work & business processes' instead.
In addition to these exercises, we have a lot of other free online exercises on CVs/resumes and job interviews vocabulary and techniques
Exercise: A job interview
Read the following part of a job interview where an interviewer asks a candidate to describe their feelings about a previous position/job.
From the context, try to guess what the meaning of the words/phrases in bold are. Then do the quiz at the end to check if you are right.
Interviewer:'Returning to your position as a sales team leader, it must have been very stressful? How did you cope with the pressure?'
Candidate:'Of course there is a lot of pressure in this type of role. The most important thing is that you have to meet your targets. My team had to sell a minimum of 2000 mobile phones every month. But I wouldn't say it was stressful, for me it was more challenging. I had to manage a team, something which I'd never done before. So I had to learn how to delegate tasks to the members of my team.
Another thing I learnt is how to react when things don't go right, when you have setbacks. You learn what you should and shouldn't do when things go wrong. I also gained experience. I learnt so much about both working in a sales environment and managing people.
Being able to solve problems and see the results of your work is very rewarding. For me, the job was extremely fulfilling, I always went to work with a smile on my face.'
Interviewer:'So you were fulfilled with what you did there. Excellent! But what did your managers think of your performance?'
Candidate:'All of my performance reviews showed that I not only met my personal and team targets, but I exceeded them. Sometimes 50% higher than my targets. For the two years I was in that position, I got very good performances bonuses, about $5,000 each time. In fact, one of my references is from my old manager there.'
Quiz:
Below is a definition/description of each of the words/phrases in bold from the above text (which you can also find in the grey box below). Answer each question with one of these words/phrases in bold. Only use one word/phrase once and write it as it is in the text. Click on the "Check" button at the bottom of the quiz to check your answers.
When the answer is correct, two icons will appear next to the answer. The 
icon contains extra information on the word/phrase. In the 
icon, you can listen to the pronunciation of the word/phrase.
Words/phrases to use in the quiz
Practice
Now that you understand the meaning of the words/phrases and when to use them, practise using them by creating your own sentences with them in English. Also click on the icon next to each correct answer and listen how each is pronounced correctly.
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