LESSON OVERVIEW

This Business English lesson plan focuses on career advice. It has been designed for career counselors, but it worked great both with HR people and adult professionals (if you want to do this with young adults without working experience, you must adapt the discussion section). The main point of the lesson is a video by Professor Scott Galloway of NYU who gives “unsolicited (and unconventional) career advice”. This ESL worksheet also includes a grammar point on giving advice using various structures. This Business English lesson plan is divided into three parts: a warm-up speaking task, grammar and video comprehension.

WARM-UP AND GRAMMAR

First, students need to discuss various aspects that may influence career. Then, they move to the grammar point. In this ESL worksheet, students revise various ways of giving advice and structures they can use for that. First, students identify grammar structures used for giving advice and then they have an opportunity to use them to respond to different real-life situations (all cases from exercise 3 were taken from Reddit’s Advice group). If you need different situations – not related to work – just go there and browse through thousands of requests for advice.

VIDEO COMPREHENSION

The next page focuses on the video. In exercise 4, students need to discuss several professional pieces of career advice and negotiate to select the most impactful ones. Next comes the video. Emphasize that they won’t always hear the exact phrases that they need to put in the gaps and they might have to infer it from the context. Also, each point refers to one piece of advice from the video. The video itself is rather funny and full of visuals, but the speaker’s speed is quite high. After checking that task go to the discussion section and divide your class in small groups to give them an opportunity to confront their ideas about the pieces of advice from the video.

All in all, this Business English lesson plan should take around 60 minutes, including the 6-minute video, depending on how much time you allocate to speaking activities. Share with us what you think about our Business English lesson plan and whether it has worked well with your students.