💼How to Succeed 💵Business English 👨‍💼 Vocabulary with JenniferESL

16,616 views ・ 2018-08-02

English with Jennifer


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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Hi everyone. It's Jennifer here with a special English lesson. I'd like to share some useful words and phrases
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along with some thoughts that you can reflect on and hopefully apply to your English Studies.
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In another video, you met my husband and you learned that he is an executive recruiter for a firm in Boston.
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He's been in his current position for about seven years,
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but he's been recruiting for more like ten years.
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We spent the first five years of our marriage in Moscow, Russia and then moved together to the U.S.
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I asked my husband to recall those early years in America and talk about how he
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felt about his English when he first came to this country.
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I've been in the U.S. since 2001.
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That makes it 17 years.
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Yes, I spoke English when I came. I studied English at a university, but it was my
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second language. I majored in French.
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It was hard.
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I had to
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practice quite a lot.
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And I would always construct
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conversations in my head
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around different kinds of situations. One of them
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was a job interview, a potential job interview.
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I was looking for a job, and I would imagine those conversations in my head...
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what kinds of questions I would be asked and
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what kind of answers I would give.
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So I would... probably before my first real job interview, had probably had 25-30 mock-up interviews in my head before.
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One strategy that my husband used as a language learner was to talk aloud to himself or to talk in his head.
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He did this to practice his English for a specific
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situation, like a job interview.
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He mentioned a mock-up interview, which is a situation that's made to seem real for training purposes.
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"Mock-up interview" is clear, but I hear "mock interview" more often.
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So if you're getting ready for a job interview, you can ask a friend to help you by doing a mock interview.
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Your friend can ask questions as the potential employer, and you can practice giving your answers.
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My husband is doing very well now, but success hardly ever comes fast and easily.
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I'll let him talk about working his way up to his current position.
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No, we arrived in Boston right after September 11. The economy was in recession.
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It was hard to find a job.
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So my first job in the U.S.
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was a
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grocery clerk at a local grocery store, a
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minimum-wage job that would pay me seven dollars fifteen cents an hour and
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was extremely boring, but you've got to do what you got to do you got to put the food on the table.
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And you just, as they say here, you check your ego at the door and you take any job that will allow you to provide.
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Before I landed a full-time job, I had two
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temp jobs.
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One of them was a typesetter
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at a local printing company and the other one was an interpreter at a local hospital.
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My first full-time job was with the local
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custodial bank and
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I was
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processing dividends in interest payments. It's called corporate actions, and I used to work the night shift from
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4:00 a.m. til 12:00 noon.
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I did this for two and a half years.
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The difference between a full-time job and a temp job is that a full-time job gives you
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so-called benefits, which basically comes down to health insurance and
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401k contribution.
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My first full-time job was what we call an entry-level job.
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This is a kind of a job that anyone would get fresh out of college.
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You cannot support your family on the salary that
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they would pay you.
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It was less than $40,000 a year.
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To put things in perspective, at that time we rented a one-bedroom apartment
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in Boston and
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the price was $1,700 a month
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with parking.
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"To put things into perspective" is to understand a situation more fully. You no longer have a limited view.
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My husband explained how we came to the U.S. at a really bad time to start a job search.
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Initially, he could only find a minimum wage job at a grocery store.
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That means that his employer paid him the lowest wages possible in the state of Massachusetts.
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The sad thing was that I was earning even less at one of my jobs.
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I could only find a part-time job as a teacher. So to make ends meet,
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I also babysat for
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$6 an hour.
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"To make ends meet" means to earn just enough to survive.
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My husband used another good expression with a similar meaning: to put food on the table.
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It basically means that you earn enough to feed yourself and meet your basic needs.
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You might not be able to find your dream job right away,
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so most of us take what work we can get when we simply need to make ends meet and put food on the table.
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My husband also had two jobs for a while. He worked the night shift.
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Do you remember the hours he worked?
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It was 4:00 a.m. till 12:00 noon.
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Would you be willing to work the night shift?
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I would hate it. I prefer the day shift. I need to work in the daytime.
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I prefer regular business hours or what some call normal business hours.
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That's usually 9:00 to 5:00.
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There are different types of jobs one can get. A temp job is a temporary position.
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A full-time position has a salary and it comes with benefits like health insurance and a retirement savings plan.
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My husband explained the low salary of an entry-level job. It can be less than
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$40,000 a year.
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If you have a family or you're planning on having a family, it can be very difficult to put food on the table earning that much,
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especially in an expensive city like Boston.
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I'll let him explain how he eventually moved out of that entry-level position and began to earn more.
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I did recruiting in Russia and I liked it. I did it for two to two and a half years.
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So after working for for a couple years at a local bank,
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I came to the conclusion that that was not a
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long-term career for me. I did not like it at all.
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I wanted something that
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would give me a
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better opportunity to make more money, and I went into a hundred percent commission business.
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You basically eat what you kill.
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No salary.
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Pure Commission. If you close a deal, your company gets paid. You get a percentage of that.
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It was very scary when my husband moved to a job that was 100 percent commission based.
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There was no guarantee of a salary.
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When you work on commission, you have to make a sale in order to get paid.
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At the time, our first child was born, so there was a lot of pressure on my husband to succeed.
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Thankfully, he became good at the job. He closed deals and his compensation did more than put food on the table.
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I asked him to talk about the challenges of being in a new line of work.
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The initial challenge was that
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it was a completely different line of work from what I was accustomed to at a bank. It required a lot of cold calling.
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Picking up a phone and calling total strangers and
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it was difficult
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psychologically because you would deal with great deal of rejection.
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But also my English had to be
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taken to the next level.
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I was...uh
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I needed to convince people
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to look into the opportunities that I was presenting them with.
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I needed to position myself as an expert on a matter. I needed to position myself
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as an authority and
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it it would it would require a lot of convincing.
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Initially, I would write scripts and I would read off of those scripts, but eventually as time went on.
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It became second nature.
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Note these expressions. Cold calling is making phone calls to strangers in order to make a sales pitch.
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So you're trying to sell a product or a service.
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If you take something to the next level, then you raise the standard. You try to improve it.
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My husband had to take his English to the next level.
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If you position yourself as something such as an expert or an authority, then you present yourself a certain way.
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You know, it's not just the language that a foreigner has to get used to. It's also the work culture.
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My husband began his professional career in Moscow, Russia, which had a different work environment.
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The biggest difference between a Russian and American company is the number of performance reviews done by
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American companies.
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The two biggest things that
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are really appreciated when you work for an American company are perseverance and
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in a positive attitude,
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especially in sales.
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There are down days. There are up days. As they say, the highs are high; the lows are low.
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And sometimes those deals just do not go through and
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it hurts. It hurts to the point that you literally want to cry. You want to go
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back to your home.
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But what you do is maybe you take a walk on the street, come back and get back, get back into cold calling...
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And...
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as they say, it's a numbers game. The more phone calls you place, the better chance that you will land a deal.
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In almost any line of work, there are ups and downs. We can also talk about highs and lows. We've all gone through them.
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Hopefully, my husband's story will remind you that it's okay to feel bad on those down days.
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But as he said, the key is perseverance.
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Don't give up and keep trying. Hold on to a positive attitude.
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Tip number one: embrace the culture.
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In everyday life, there are a lot of
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cultural references
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that would not make sense to you unless you know the origins of
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certain expressions.
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Tip number two is try to spend as much time as you can with native speakers.
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Yeah, tip number three is
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never stop learning. I've been here for 17 years. I don't know the word --
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I look it up in a dictionary. I find myself in a situation
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in which I don't know what to say...sometimes it happens.
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Later on
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I would replay that very same situation in my head and I would think, "Okay. What would I say?" and
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I would..
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I would come up with the words
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that would articulate my thoughts. So next time I'm in a very similar situation, I would know what to say.
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I watch a lot of
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YouTube videos.
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I read a lot of news and I try to apply all those learnings in my everyday
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interaction with my colleagues, with my clients, with my candidates.
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Never stop learning.
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So you've heard my husband speak at length. He doesn't rush and he doesn't fear mistakes in English.
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I hope that's a useful model for you.
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Don't feel pressured to speak as fast as possible in English. That will probably lead to more mistakes and less accurate pronunciation.
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The goal is to speak clearly and be understood.
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I'm going to end here.
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Hopefully. now you have some new words and expressions to put into use. If you'd like to choose one or two of those words or
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expressions and create your own examples, share them in the comments. I'll offer corrections as time allows.
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Well, that's all for now. Please remember to like this video and subscribe. As always, thanks for watching and happy studies!
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