Office English / Describing your job

How would you describe your job?

It's really difficult to explain what my job is to people. I think my parents still, after many years, don't really understand what I do.

When I have to describe what a friend does to another friend, sometimes I feel like I sound really stupid because I'm, I don't exactly know how to explain it.

Today on Office English, we're talking about how to make what you do clear to other people.

Hello and welcome to Office English, your podcast guide to the world of work. I'm Phil.

And I'm Pippa. You can find a transcript for this episode to read along while you listen at bbclearningenglish.com.

So, Pippa, we heard from some colleagues at the start of the programme about their experience trying to tell other people what they do. Do you ever have difficulty understanding people's job titles and descriptions?

Yes, I do have difficulty with that sometimes, and there's often a lot of jargon or generic words used for people's job titles. So some examples might be producer, project manager, consultant. And that could mean a lot of different things. So I find that a bit confusing sometimes.

I'll tell you what, I actually find it quite difficult to explain my own job to people who don't, who don't work in the same industry. The job title itself says very little, so I tend to find I just describe the things I do every day and hope that people work it out from there.

Hmm. Yeah. And we can also find it difficult to see similarities with other jobs, other industries and recognise the skills that we use. So in this episode, we're going to talk about describing your job to people within your organisation, outside your organisation, and also how to describe your job when you want to apply for a new job or change career.