LESSON OVERVIEW

The main objectives of this speaking lesson are to:

• discuss and reflect upon career change;
• talk about important skills for career transition;
• watch a video and discuss reasons for a career change. 

With this speaking lesson about career change, students discuss reasons why people change careers, examine data to talk about job market trends and share their thoughts on benefits and challenges when someone transitions careers. They also imagine they want to change careers, talk about important skills in that scenario and watch a short video about a woman who changed careers.   

This is a Speaking Class worksheet. It includes a variety of tasks that let your students practise their speaking skills. This lesson format does not focus on grammar or vocabulary. Learn more about it here.

WARM-UP AND DISCUSSION

This speaking lesson about career change starts with a warm-up in which students brainstorm reasons people change jobs and careers. After that, they examine some statistics related to jobs and careers around the world and discuss questions on job market trends and their own perspectives. Next, students read job and career situations and complete statements about what they think some challenges and benefits of those changes might be. Then, they imagine they want to change careers. Students choose a profession they would be interested in and, for different categories (e.g. skills from your current profession that would be useful in your new career), they choose skills from a list (e.g. attention to detail, computer software knowledge, creativity, etc.). They can also come up with their own ideas and give details. 

VIDEO AND FOLLOW-UP

In this part of the speaking lesson about career change, students decide which topics the person in the video is most likely to mention (e.g. working fewer hours, investing money, being helpful to others, etc.) and explain why they think so. Afterwards, students watch the video and check if they were right. They also discuss career change and share their opinion on the video. Next, students choose cases of career transition (e.g. from a chef to a dietician, from a nurse to an actor, from a librarian to a social media manager, etc.) and talk about important points related to them (e.g. the reasons people might be changing careers, the biggest challenge they will probably face, etc.). Finally, they discuss future job market skills and trends in this realm.