One of the first ways a consultant will use English on the job is in expert interviews. This course will prepare you for interviewing an expert. You will learn the following:
- how to ask direct and indirect questions;
- how to give polite commands and directions;
- how to ask follow up questions;
- active listening skills;
- confirming information;
- clarification; and
- how to finish the interview.
If you are preparing for an expert interview, you should take this course. It is also recommended that you do a lesson or two to practice before an interview:
- clarify the language of the specific questions you will ask; and
- practice overall discussion of the topic, as well an the kind of answers you might expect.
All lessons for this course are online. There is no textbook to purchase.
Time to complete
Consultants are often required to interview industry experts and colleagues abroad. It is usually one of the first things that they need 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.)
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.