Jobs and Career Conversation Class

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This lesson plan is a conversation class where adult students talk about their childhood, career path and work history. It is suitable for levels B1-C1.

I stole the the first film clip idea from http://www.film-english.com but the second part is all my own.

Lesson plan:

Brainstorm jobs, put students in pairs or small groups and give them 5 minutes to write as many different jobs as they can. Tell them that you’ll award them 1 point for each job that another group has also come up with but 2 points for a unique job that nobody else thought of.

Go through jobs and put them on the board.

Tell students they are going to watch a film called “when I grow up”. They have to make predictions about what’s going to happen in the film. Go through predictions and put them on the board.

Tell them to watch the film and try and note as many jobs as they can from it. (there are a lot!)

Show the film:

Film discussion

Put students in small groups to discuss the following questions:

What’s the film about?

What’s the message of the film?

Do you think it accurately represents the pressures on children nowadays?

Feedback to whole class

Career path discussion

Download the question handout from here:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=79CFF252BEEA0A7D!323&authkey=!AHaWX3an3ocpNVw

Students discuss the following questions in small groups:

How did you decide which job you wanted to do?

How did you get your job?

What did you want to be when you were a child? Did you get that job?

Who influenced your career choices the most?

Did you have a careers advisor at school?

If so, what did they tell you?

Was your career choice influenced by the grades you got at school?

Have you made any big career changes in your life? Would you like to?

What was your position when you joined your current company / workplace?

Have you ever been promoted?

Have you ever been headhunted?

Do you work in a management role? Would you like to work in one?

What’s more important for your job, your experience or your qualifications?

If you have children would you ever dissuade them from choosing a particular career?

• Musician
• Actor
• Journalist
• Dancer
• Doctor

All groups feedback to the class.

Interview Roleplay

What’s more important work experience or life experience?

Students are going to do a job interview roleplay. This works best with groups of 4, 2 interviewers and 2 candidates.

Give out role cards and give interviewers a minute to think of the job that the interview is for. When they have decided give the candidates a minute to invent some relative experience. Interviewers should also come up with some typical difficult interview questions:

Examples:

• What can you offer the company?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• Think of a time when you solved a problem using your own initiative.
• Think of a time when youmade a mistake at work, what did you learn from it?

Download the role cards from here:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=79CFF252BEEA0A7D!325&authkey=!AJiYHkz8VOfyYrc

Candidate 1:

You are 35 years old, you have had the same job in the same company since you were 18. You have to change job because your company has gone bankrupt. You have 17 years of experience doing the job you are going for.

Candidate 2:

You are 35 years old. You have had 12 different jobs over the last 17 years. You only worked to save money to go travelling. Now you want to settle down and start a family. Convince the managers that you are the one for the job.

Interviewers:

You have 2 candidates for a role in your company (you decide the role) one candidate has a lot of work experience and the other has a lot of life experience. Interview them both and make a decision.

Feedback, which candidate got the job and why?

freeenglishlessonplans.com