Vocabulary
The words you need whenever the topic is jobs, pay or careers. With a practice exercise.
IELTS vocabulary for work is used more often than any other topic except education. It appears in Part 1 of the speaking test, where almost every candidate is asked about their job or studies, and again in Part 3 and in Task 2 essays about careers, automation and working conditions.
The words below are grouped the way examiners would expect you to use them. Learning ten at a time and putting each one into a sentence about your own working life works far better than reading the whole list once.
The words
Six groups. Learn one group at a time rather than the whole page.
Full-time — a standard working week, usually around forty hours.
Part-time — fewer hours than a full-time job.
Self-employed — working for yourself rather than for an employer.
Freelance — self-employed and working for several clients.
A temporary contract — a job that ends on a fixed date.
To apply for a job — to formally ask to be considered.
To be appointed — to be given the position.
To resign, or to hand in your notice — to leave by your own choice.
To be dismissed, informally sacked — to be removed for poor work or misconduct.
To be made redundant — to lose a job because the position no longer exists.
Work is uncountable. You can have too much work, never too many works or a work. A job is countable and means one position. A career is your working life as a whole. Candidates lose marks for this every day, and it is an easy fix.
Also keep made redundant and sacked apart: redundancy is nobody’s fault, dismissal is.
A salary — a fixed amount paid monthly, usually to professional staff.
Wages — pay calculated by the hour or the week.
A pay rise — an increase in what you earn.
Benefits, or perks — extras such as health cover or a company car.
The minimum wage — the lowest hourly rate the law allows.
To be promoted — to move to a more senior position.
An internship — a short period of work, often unpaid, taken for experience.
Vocational training — training for a specific trade or occupation.
A demanding job — one that requires a great deal of effort.
A dead-end job — one with no prospect of advancement.
Remote working — working away from the employer’s premises.
Flexitime — choosing your own start and finish times within limits.
Work-life balance — the division between working hours and private life.
Burnout — exhaustion caused by prolonged stress at work.
The gig economy — short-term or one-off jobs arranged through apps and platforms.
Method
Six ways these words earn marks rather than just filling space.
Made redundant is more precise than lost his job, and it tells the examiner you know the difference between losing a post and being dismissed.
Employ, employer, employee, employment, unemployment. Five forms take barely longer than one and let you rewrite a sentence instead of repeating it.
You apply for a job, hand in your notice, work long hours, take on staff and run a business. Wrong pairings are noticed even when every word is real.
Work, employment, training and unemployment are all uncountable. Job, career, salary and contract are countable. Getting this wrong is a grammar error as well as a vocabulary one.
Should the working week be shorter? Will machines replace human workers? Is it better to work for yourself? These recur, and having the vocabulary ready saves thinking time.
A word learned inside a sentence about your own job or your own plans is remembered far better than a word learned from a list.
Practice
Choose the word that fits each sentence.
Read the whole sentence before you choose. Several options will be real words, and often more than one will nearly fit.
The test is precision: which word means exactly what the sentence needs?
1A worker who loses a job because the position no longer exists has been made ______.
Redundant. Redundancy happens when the employer no longer needs the role. Being dismissed means you were removed for poor performance or misconduct, which is a very different thing to say about someone.
2Choose the correct sentence.
Too much work. Work is uncountable, so it takes much rather than many and never takes a. If you mean one position, use job: I have a demanding job.
3Money paid monthly to a professional employee is a ______.
Salary. Wages are calculated by the hour or the week. A fee is paid for a particular service, and a fare is what you pay to travel.
4The gig economy refers to ______.
Short-term jobs arranged through apps and platforms. Delivery driving and ride-hailing are the usual examples. Unpaid work taken for experience is an internship.
5You ______ a job, and if you are successful you ______ the position.
Apply for / are appointed to. These are the standard collocations. You are promoted only once you already work there, so it cannot describe getting the job in the first place.
6A job with no opportunity for advancement is a ______ job.
Dead-end. A demanding job is hard work but may still lead somewhere. A temporary job simply has an end date, which is not the same as having no prospects.
That is a collocation problem rather than a vocabulary one, and it is very hard to spot in your own writing because every word looks correct on its own.
The complete IELTS course on IELTStestONLINE has video lessons on every question type, many more exercises like this one, and your own support tutor you can ask when an answer does not make sense. Take a look at the complete course
Recognising a word in a multiple choice is not the same as producing it accurately under time in an essay.
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Yes, one of the two most common. Speaking Part 1 asks almost every candidate about their job or their studies, and work appears regularly in Task 2 and in Section 3 of the listening test.
Work is uncountable and means activity or effort. A job is one countable position. A career is your working life as a whole, or a profession followed over many years.
It is informal rather than wrong, and it would be fine in speaking. In Task 2 use dismissed, and use made redundant if the job itself disappeared.
Yes. Invented answers are harder to sustain under questioning, and Part 1 answers about your own work are easier to extend naturally.
Yes. Lexical Resource assesses precision as well as range, so an ambitious word used slightly wrongly scores lower than a simple word used correctly.
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Technique takes most candidates to about Band 6.5. Past that, the limit is usually the range of language you can use accurately, and knowing where you stand is the first step.
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