- •Market leader Unit 1 Careers
- •Vocabulary (Career Moves)
- •Complete these sentences with the verbs from the box. Use a good dictionary to help you.
- •Look at the groups of words below. Cross out the noun or noun phrase which doesn't go with the verb in each group.
- •Reading (Female Train Drivers)
- •Are certain careers more suitable for women than for men? Which do you consider a) for women only? b) for men only? c) for either? Include other careers.
- •Look at the advertisement below from the popular uk women's magazine Cosmopolitan. Do you think many people applied? Why or why not?
- •Now read the article. What do these numbers in the article refer to?
- •Cosmopolitan readers queue for Tube job
- •Answer these questions about the article.
- •Language review (Modals 1: ability, requests and offers)
- •Rearrange the words in 1 to 9 to make questions from a job interview. Then decide whether each question is a) making a request, b) making an offer or c) asking about ability.
- •Match the questions in Exercise a with the interviewee's answers below.
- •Skills (Telephoning: making contact)
- •What kinds of telephone calls do you make in English? What useful telephone expressions do you know?
- •Complete the expressions on the right so they have the same meaning as the ones on the left.
- •Complete these phrases:
- •Underline each phrase the speaker uses.
- •1.6, 1,7, 1.8 Read the essential information about each candidate on page 13. Then listen to the interview extracts.
- •The career ladder
- •In your organisation, or one you would like to join, is there a clear career ladder? What must you do to succeed in climbing the ladder?
- •In your organisation?
- •In organisations in general? The midlife crisis
- •Read as far as ... His home town, Alexandria in the article and then answer these questions.
- •Read to the end of the article and answer these questions.
- •Find words in the article to complete this table.
- •Look at the article again. Can you find words in the article related to the words below? Which parts of speech are they (noun, verb, adjective or adverb)?
- •Who's ambitious now?
- •Look again at the article above and underline the six different kinds of business. Where would you put them in this matrix? Explain your reasons. Where would you put your field of work?
In your organisation?
In organisations in general? The midlife crisis
Before you read
What do you understand by 'midlife crisis'?
What are the signs that someone is having one?
Reading
Read this article from and answer the questions:
Making the most of the midlife crisis
Feeling deeply bored and burnt out? If you are over 30, you may be showing the first signs of a midlife crisis. You could completely change your career, as did Gauguin, the French painter who gave up his job as a stockbroker to travel the world and paint.
But there are many ways of 'doing a Gauguin'. For some it means going back to university, for others it may be opening a beach bar in the Caribbean or finding a new partner. Those who have the money may take a year off to sail around the world and think about the meaning of life. Whatever the exit, it usually takes courage to find it.
Midlife crises can happen at 31, at 56 or several times during one's life. As well as having a huge personal impact, they can have a significant impact on organisations. At midlife, executives are normally at the peak of their careers and charged with making critical decisions.
Manfred Kets de Vries, professor of management and leadership at Insead business school, Fontainebleau, France, interviewed 200 senior executives from around the world (average age 46) and published a study of what they went through in midlife.
One interviewee, the chief executive of a Swedish newspaper, explained his feelings: 'To my horror, I would begin to disappear emotionally in the middle of presentations ... People would see it. They would become nervous ... their attention would wander ... To this strange state of mind was also added my inability to listen to and function with other people.'
1 Imagine that each paragraph in the article has a heading. Choose the best heading for each paragraph from the list below and number them in the correct order.
A business school professor interviewed 200 senior managers around the world about the midlife crisis
An example of someone in a midlife crisis
Different people have different ideas about what they would do if they had a midlife crisis
Feeling bored may be the first sign of a midlife crisis
Midlife crises can happen at almost any age from early 30s onwards
2 Choose the correct alternative. Then comment on the verb tenses in italics.
Feeling deeply bored and burnt out? If you are over 30, you may be showing the first signs of a midlife crisis, (line 2) This means that it is
certainly a midlife crisis,
possibly a midlife crisis,
certainly not a midlife crisis.
Those who have the money may take a year off to sail around the world ... (line 15) This means that they
will possibly sail around the world.
have permission to sail around the world.
will certainly sail around the world.
Midlife crises can happen at 31, at 56 or several times during one's life. As well as having a huge personal impact, they can have a significant impact on organisations. (lines 20 and 23)
This means that midlife crises
always happen in the way described.
sometimes happen in the way described.
never happen in the way described.
'I would begin to disappear emotionally in the middle of presentations ... People would see it. They would become nervous ... their attention would wander...' (lines 40-44)
This means that people did these things
never
once
several times
Over to you:
A friend of yours is having a midlife crisis. Which of these things would you recommend, and why?
sail around the world
coach (= give advice to) young people in the organisation
take a job in the same company, but in another country
do voluntary work (= low-paid or unpaid work with social objectives)
stay at home for a year, read a lot of books and work on the garden
Ambition
SYMBOLS OF SUCCESS