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Speaking Part 3: Discussion: Question 4

Syllabus S.part3

Structured 4 marks

IELTS Speaking Part 3, a two-way discussion on work and careers today. Typical questions:

  1. How have people's expectations of a career changed in recent years?
  2. What impact has remote and flexible working had on careers?
  3. Do you think automation and AI will reduce the number of jobs available in the future?
  4. Is it more important for a job to pay well or to be personally fulfilling?
  5. How do you think careers will look in twenty or thirty years' time?
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Worked solution

Examiner notes: Speaking Part 3 assessment

Fluency & Coherence

Answers are structured around a clear position followed by reasoning, a qualification, and a summarising sentence, connected through natural spoken cohesion (“that’s not universal, of course”, “on the downside, though”) rather than a mechanical checklist. The length and pacing of each answer reflect genuine extended reasoning rather than padding or repetition.

Lexical Resource

The answers deploy precise, career-related vocabulary and collocations naturally (“job security”, “self-discipline”, “transition period”, “less linear”) and paraphrase the question terms (“career” becomes “roles”, “the job market”, “one continuous path”) rather than repeating them verbatim throughout.

Grammatical Range & Accuracy

A broad range of structures is used accurately: conditional and concessive clauses (“even as they eliminate others”), comparative and hedged claims (“tends to matter more”, “arguably suits some people much better”), and future speculation with appropriate modal choices (“I’d guess”, “I imagine”, “will probably keep reshaping”), all with no errors that would impede communication.

(Pronunciation is also assessed in the real Speaking test (stress, intonation and connected speech) but cannot be demonstrated in a written model answer.)

Common pitfalls specific to this task

See commonMistakes above. A common band 6 error is turning question 4 into a purely personal statement about one’s own dream job rather than a general, weighed comparison of pay versus fulfilment as competing priorities across the workforce.