Jobs & Professions Vocabulary Quiz
How many job titles and workplace words do you know in English? Match professions to their descriptions, identify what people do, and practise the vocabulary you need to talk about work and careers.
Start the Quiz →What This Quiz Covers
The vocabulary of jobs and professions is one of the first topic areas learners encounter — and one of the most immediately useful. Being able to name what people do, describe job responsibilities, and use the correct prepositions and collocations with work-related words is essential for everyday conversation, job interviews, IELTS Speaking tasks, and professional written English.
This 20-question quiz covers job titles across a wide range of sectors (healthcare, education, law, technology, arts, construction and service industries), verbs that describe professional actions (treat, design, defend, diagnose, teach, manage, operate), key collocations (apply for a job, be promoted, go on strike, work overtime), and grammatical patterns specific to talking about professions, including the article rule (She is a doctor vs She was elected President).
Questions range from A1 level (naming a basic profession from an image description) to B2 level (matching formal professional titles to their duties, understanding sector-specific vocabulary). This spread makes the quiz suitable for beginners building foundational vocabulary and intermediate learners preparing for exams or professional contexts.
What You Will Learn
- The English names for over 40 professions across medicine, law, education, business, technology, arts and trades, with attention to British and American English differences (lawyer / solicitor, lorry driver / truck driver).
- Key action verbs associated with specific jobs — a surgeon operates, a teacher instructs, an accountant audits, an architect designs — helping you describe what people do rather than just name their title.
- Essential work and career collocations: apply for, resign from, be made redundant, work freelance, go on maternity leave and more.
- The correct article usage when referring to professions: indefinite article before a job title used predicatively (She is an engineer) versus no article when a title functions as a proper name (President Obama).
How to Prepare
Before taking the quiz, make a list of jobs you know in English and look up the ones you are unsure about. Pay attention to suffixes that signal professions: -ist (scientist, journalist, pianist), -er/-or (teacher, doctor), -ian (musician, librarian, technician), -ant/-ent (accountant, consultant). These patterns help you decode unfamiliar job titles even without having seen them before.
For business and professional vocabulary, our Business English Quiz covers workplace communication, meetings and formal phrases at B1–C1 level. The Flash Cards exercise lets you build a personalised jobs vocabulary set at your own pace.
Related Quizzes
Frequently Asked Questions
A job is the specific work you do for pay — it can be short-term or part-time. A profession implies a highly skilled occupation usually requiring formal qualifications and governed by a professional body — medicine, law and teaching are classic professions. A career is the long-term progression through a field of work over many years. You can have several jobs in one career, and your career may be within a recognised profession or a broader industry.
Use the indefinite article (a/an) before a job title when it appears after the verb be or works as a description: She is a nurse, He became an engineer, They hired an architect. Omit the article when a title is used as a proper name or unique position directly before a personal name: President Biden, Dr Smith, Professor Jones. Also omit the article when the title is clearly unique within its context: She was elected Mayor.
Key job collocations include: apply for a job, get/land a job, resign from / quit a job, be promoted / get a promotion, be made redundant / be laid off, work overtime, work part-time / full-time, go on strike, be self-employed / work freelance, go on maternity/paternity leave, take early retirement. Learning verbs and prepositions in fixed combinations is far more efficient than learning single words in isolation.
Several suffixes reliably signal professions. -ist: scientist, journalist, pharmacist, economist, therapist. -er/-or: teacher, manager, director, professor, supervisor. -ian: musician, librarian, technician, optician, historian. -ant/-ent: accountant, consultant, assistant. -eer: engineer, volunteer. -ive: executive. Recognising these patterns lets you decode unfamiliar job titles without a dictionary and helps you avoid gender-specific endings that are outdated in modern English (actress, stewardess are now often replaced by actor, flight attendant).
A salary is a fixed annual amount paid to a professional or salaried employee, usually divided into monthly payments. A wage is pay calculated by the hour or day, typical of manual, trade or hourly-rate work. Related words: pay rise (UK) or raise (US) means an increase in pay; bonus is extra pay for performance; commission is a percentage of sales. Payslip is the document showing your earnings and deductions each pay period.
Use the verb work with a preposition to describe your situation: I work for a company / in healthcare / as an engineer / at a school. To describe duties, use I am responsible for…, My role involves…, I deal with…, I manage…. For IELTS Speaking Part 1, practise answers like: "I work as a marketing manager for a tech startup. My main responsibilities involve planning digital campaigns and analysing data." Aim for two to three sentences with specific vocabulary rather than a simple one-word answer.
An employer is the person or organisation that hires and pays others. An employee is the person who works for an employer for a salary or wage. A self-employed person works for themselves — they are their own employer, taking on clients or customers directly. Related terms: freelancer (self-employed, often project-based), contractor (hired for a fixed period or project), entrepreneur (someone who starts and runs their own business).
Jobs and work are core IELTS topics. In IELTS Speaking Part 1, you may be asked about your current job or studies. In Speaking Part 3, abstract questions arise about job automation, work-life balance and the future of work. In IELTS Writing Task 2, essays about unemployment, remote working, gender pay gaps and career satisfaction are common. In Reading and Listening, texts describe workplace scenarios, job advertisements and career interviews. Building a strong jobs vocabulary — including formal professional terms — directly improves your score across all four skills.
Yes. Modern English strongly prefers gender-neutral job titles. Actor is now used for all genders (not actress). Flight attendant replaces stewardess/steward. Police officer replaces policeman/policewoman. Firefighter replaces fireman. Chair or chairperson replaces chairman. In professional and academic writing, always use neutral forms. In conversational English, most speakers also use neutral forms by default, though the older gendered forms may still be understood.
The most efficient approach is to learn job words in semantic groups: all healthcare jobs together (surgeon, nurse, paramedic, pharmacist, radiologist), then all legal jobs (solicitor, barrister, judge, paralegal), and so on. Use the Flash Cards exercise to review groups until you can recall them quickly. Then practise using each word in a sentence describing what that person does. Combining the job title with its key verb (a chef cooks, a pilot flies, a therapist counsels) doubles your learning in the same time.