This course will prepare you for interviewing an expert. You will practice the following:
- starting perfectly;
- setting context;
- asking smooth, clear questions;
- guiding the expert from topic to topic;
- listening actively;
- getting more information;
- asking hypothetical questions; and
- finishing strongly.
If you have to interview experts in English, this is the course for you.
This Expert Interviews course is part of The English Farm's broader course Business English for Consultants. It is not necessary to do previous modules, but if you need to use English in a consulting workplace, then you will find useful topics in the previous lessons.
Time to complete
Consultants are often required to interview industry experts and colleagues abroad. It is usually one of the first things that they have to do in English on the job. They need to find out best practices, successful past examples, and so on.
Experts are paid a lot of money for their time, and it is essential that the time is used well. Younger consultants are often intimidated by this task, since it can be the first time that they have had to use English professionally.
This course is designed to prepare a consultant for an intensive Q&A session, and to train them to guide the conversation.
After the student has completed the lessons in the course, recommend that they do some practice sessions with you, brainstorming questions and so forth. They should test the specific questions out with you to check for grammar, etc. (Note that the exact details could be confidential, so keep it generic.)
Point out that classes in general should be good practice for their performance in expert interviews (with their teacher as the expert), and as such, the techniques and phrases that they learn here should be used on a regular basis in class.