Your email English is fine, and then someone says let's park that and circle back.

Every one of these is over in five minutes and comes round again next week.

• The stand-up in two minutes

  Yesterday, today, blocked on what. It is reported speech, past simple against present perfect, and a technical noun phrase, delivered into a slot that has already started closing.

• Dial-in audio at nine in the morning

  Conference audio strips the consonants, and English leans on consonants to keep fifteen apart from fifty. You need the repair moves — sorry, you cut out, could you say that again — without apologising for your English.

• Tell me about a time

  English-speaking interviews run on behavioural questions, answered as a story with a result. The tense sequence alone is work: past simple for what happened, past perfect for what had gone wrong before it.

• The viva, behind a closed door

  A British doctoral viva is private, open-ended in length and can run for hours; the conference microphone is its two-minute version. Either way the question comes from someone who has read the work and wants it defended out loud.

• Disagreeing without causing offence

  In English the disagreement is buried in hedges — I'm not sure that follows, I'd push back slightly, that might be tricky. Said flatly, the same point lands as rudeness, and nobody tells you.

• The visa and the certificate

  A first Skilled Worker application to the UK now needs B2 across all four skills, speaking included, on a Home Office approved test. Universities and hospitals set their own bars on top of that.

Work English runs on modals, hedges and particles.

None of it is advanced English. It is ordinary English that has to come out at the speed a meeting moves, with the stress in the right place and the particle attached to the right verb.

• Could, would and might doing the work tone does elsewhere: send me the figures is an instruction, could you send me the figures is not.
• The meeting's phrasal verbs — park it, circle back, roll out, follow up, push back, take it offline — none of them guessable from the parts.
• Conditionals in negotiation — if we ship on Friday, we'd have to cut the migration — which mix tenses in ways writing hides.
• Interrupting: sorry, can I come in here, and getting back to your point after somebody has talked over you.
• The impersonal for academic talk — it was found, this suggests — said at speed, with the beat on found and suggests and nowhere else.
• Following a call where the Dubliner, the Texan and the colleague from Lagos all set the pace, and each of them flattens different syllables.

No job, no glossary

No amount of rehearsal here decides a hiring panel, an admissions committee or a visa officer. And your field's terminology is yours: we do not know what your team calls things, and that is the one part of this you can look up in an evening. What we rehearse is the situation, and what comes back is a note of where it broke.