Interviews In Business English
How To Prepare For Interviews In Business English Online
Communication skills are important in many facets of life. The ability to fluently communicate in business English is vital for your career aspirations – especially in environments where financial and legal English is required.
Job interviews can be nerve-racking at the best of times. When you have to express yourself in a second language, it is understandable that you will feel under immense pressure.
Our online Business English courses are designed to help you speak business English with confidence. If you live in Vienna and need help to prepare for an interview, we can focus an entire class around selling yourself in business English.
What to expect from Business English Courses Online
Our online business English classes help you prepare for interviews by focusing on the relevant vocabulary you will use during an interview.
We examine the qualities the interviewer is looking for in candidates and build stories from your past around those qualities.
We don’t encourage students to prepare precise answers to learn verbatim. If you trying to recall a pre-written script under interview conditions, you invite unnecessary pressure and will not appear natural.
Our online business English courses are designed to help you organise past tenses so that you can describe an event in your past in fluent English. The aim is to bring your English language skills up to a level that is expected in a business environment.
Prepare Interview Responses in Business English
Most interviewers will ask you to describe a challenge you have overcome in the past that demonstrates you have the experience to cope with the role they are offering.
Your responses to these types of questions will be to tell a brief story. The context of your story will be to showcase skills the interviewer is looking for in the job advert.
To tell a story about a previous challenge, you will be speaking in the past tense. When you are talking about a situation that happened on one occasion in the past, use the past simple tense.
Examples of past simple tense:
- I was the manager of a small sales team.
- I went to speak with the colleague in question.
- I had to complete a task in 2 hours to meet the deadline.
Regular verbs in the simple past tense end with either ‘d’ or ‘ed’. Irregular verbs have a variety of endings and need to be learned – there are no solid rules.
Examples of regular verbs in past simple tense:
- I walked
- I worked
- I handed
- I concluded
- I managed
Sometimes when you are telling a story from the past, you may need to throw in a past perfect continuous tense. This allows you to build in more interesting facts about your story and draw a broader picture of events and circumstances.
The past perfect continuous tense fits into a story when there is a twist. It usually involves a different aspect of the past but later has an impact on the situation you are describing in your story.
Example of past perfect continuous
“So, I had been preparing a training session for a small group of three, but the day before, had to quickly change my delivery strategy to accommodate more people.”
Learn Business English Online
If you have to give an interview in English, contact us today and learn how to speak fluent business English online. By practising Business English online with one of our native English tutors in Vienna, you will feel well prepared and confident speaking about yourself in English.
