Learning English

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• Understanding rules at work
• How to apologise politely 

Introduction

Do you have big goals for your career? In this episode of Office English, Pippa and Phil talk about language for performance reviews and career conversations.

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This is a transcript of a spoken conversation and is not a word-for-word script.

Pippa
Do you have goals for your career?

Becca
It is good to have a sense of optimism, because I think that that can really push you forward to certain achievements.

Georgie
I think it's important to make sure your goals are realistic, because it's easy to think really big, and then it can be disheartening if you don't achieve those things.

Phil
In this episode of Office English, we'll talk about the language you need to help you progress in your career.

Pippa
Hello and welcome to Office English from BBC Learning English, your podcast guide to the world of work. I'm Pippa.

Phil
And I'm Phil. You can find a transcript and subtitles for this podcast to read along with on our website.

Pippa
So Phil, today we're talking about career or job goals. Do you think goals are important at work?

Phil
Um, it might depend on your job, but I think usually yes, they are, because they're a way that you can motivate yourself to improve your performance and to do more at work.

Pippa
Mhm. Yeah. I suppose it's good to have something to aim for, especially if sometimes you feel like your job is quite repetitive. But more practically, most organisations have performance reviews or appraisals and this is where they'll expect you to set goals for yourself, for your job, maybe for your career as well, and for the work that you're going to do over the next year.

Phil
Yes. And today we're going to talk about that formal performance review process. But you could also use a lot of this language in general conversations about goals with your line manager and to set your own goals.

Pippa
OK. One thing you're often expected to do at your performance review is to think and talk about your achievements, about what's been going well at work. How would you do this, Phil?

Phil
Well, yeah, you probably want to identify the areas that you feel have been strong or that you feel, particularly targets are often about improvement rather than just achievement. So it might be 'this year I've made real progress in...' and then you mention an area where you think you've got better at doing something.

Pippa
Yeah. You also might want to talk about the areas that you think you're particularly good at doing something. So where you maybe go above and beyond, you do more than other people. So you could say something like, 'one thing I think I excel at is...' and Excel just means do really well.

Phil
Yes. And you can talk about areas where you feel particularly proud of your achievements. You could say, 'I am particularly proud of this' or something else. What can be quite useful here, depending on where you work, but you might need to list evidence for the things that you're saying. So you might be 'I'm particularly proud of the 20% increase...' in a certain figure, or maybe a project that you've completed, um, that you can use as evidence to back up the fact that you've achieved something.

Of course, when looking at your performance, you'll also be expected to talk about what you could improve. Now, this can be really helpful to prepare you to set some goals for the year ahead, but it can be difficult to talk about our weaknesses, though.

Pippa
Yes, I think often we don't like to show weaknesses at work, and especially in that stressful performance review. You don't want to kind of say, 'oh, I'm really bad at my job'. Um so you could think about this in a slightly different way. So think about what you haven't had much experience in through no fault of your own. So for example, you could say, 'I'm not spending much time working on...' sales, for example, 'and I'd love to have more experience with that'. Think about how your manager can help you as well.

Phil
Yeah, and it also can be something that you'd like more help or support with. So you might, you might want to talk about something, it might be worth talking about something that you're finding very stressful, but that you think with the right support and training, you can improve at.

Pippa
Hmm. Yes, you could say 'I'm finding, I'm finding sales really stressful. It would be great to have some more training so that I feel really confident.' And there could be something that you know you need to work on so you can be honest about this. You say, 'I know I need to address this issue' and address just means fix. Um, saying this yourself before your manager says it can be useful in some organisations because it shows that you recognise the things that you're not as good at.

So having looked at what you're good at and what you can improve, you'll normally be asked to set some goals for the next year. How can we talk about goals at work, Phil?

Phil
Quite often, it's good to start by looking at what's gone well and then think, how can you build on that? How can you take the skills and knowledge that you've developed and make things even better?

Pippa
Yeah, and you can also look at things you'd like to improve. How can you improve them? As we said earlier, it might be training. It might be support from your line manager. It might be having a plan to just spend more time on the things that you find difficult.

Phil
And now one of the things that you'll hear talked about is SMART targets and SMART, it's a, it's an acronym. Each of the letters stands for a particular word which are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based. And these are supposed to be the things that will make a target more effective if you set your goal in those terms.

Pippa
Mhm. Yes. Because sometimes we might make unrealistic goals. We might make goals that don't have a real way of knowing whether we have achieved them. So all of these different aspects can help you make a goal that you can actually measure at the end of the year, have I done it or not? And so an example would be something like 'by the end of the year, I will have taken responsibility for a new project and followed it through from the beginning to the end, making a 10% increase on sales'.

Phil
Oh yeah, that sounds very SMART.

Pippa
That's it for this episode of Office English. Find more programmes to help you with your business. English at bbclearningenglish.com.

Phil
We'll be back next week to talk about keeping everyone happy at work. See you then.

Pippa
Bye.

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