Describe a person who is good at their job

このキューカードへの取り組み方

このキューカード（cue card）で最も強い回答は、一般的な褒め言葉ではなく、能力を示す具体的な根拠から生まれます。「she’s good at her job」と主張するだけでなく、それを実証するために、少なくとも1つ具体的な例が必要です。難しい状況をうまく切り抜けた、ほかの人が任されなかった責任を任された、などです。

仕事内容をある程度よく理解している人を選びましょう。先生、上司、医師、あるいは仕事ぶりを見てきた職人の親戚などです。その仕事が実際に何をするのかをあいまいにしか知らないと、なぜその人が上手なのかを説得力をもって説明するのが難しくなります。

回答の構成としては、最初にその人と役割を紹介し、どうやって知り合ったかを簡単に説明します。そのあと、「explain」の行に本格的に時間を使いましょう。「why you think they’re good at their job」は、実質的にこのキューカードの要点そのもので、1文では足りません。

この回答を引き上げる語彙

1分間の準備プラン

1分間の準備時間にメモできること：

• who: name or relationship, role
• job: what it involves
• how know them: context or connection
• why good at it: specific evidence

回答例

以下は、このカードで回答全体をどう組み立てるかを示す一例です。構成とレベルを示すためのもので、そのまま暗記して話すためのものではありません。

I’d like to talk about my former manager, Aziza, who worked as the head of customer service at the company where I had my first proper job a few years ago. I got to know her fairly closely because I reported directly to her for almost two years, which meant I saw her handling day-to-day problems, not just giving instructions from a distance. Her actual role involved managing a fairly large team and stepping in personally whenever a customer complaint became too difficult for junior staff to resolve on their own, which happened more often than you’d expect in that kind of business. What convinced me she was genuinely good at her job wasn’t just that she was calm under pressure, although she was, but that she seemed to have a real knack for reading exactly what an angry customer actually needed to hear to feel resolved, often within the first minute of a call. I remember one particularly difficult situation where a client had been overcharged repeatedly through no fault of our team, and instead of just apologising, she personally investigated the billing error, fixed it, and called the client back herself the same day, which most managers at that level would have delegated. She also had a habit of quietly training junior staff by explaining her reasoning out loud during calls rather than just taking over, which meant the whole team gradually got better under her, not just the difficult cases she personally handled. It’s fairly rare, in my experience, to see someone equally good at the technical side of a job and at developing the people around them.

このカードでよくあるミス

• その人が仕事が上手だという具体的な根拠を挙げず、一般的に褒めるだけになること
• その人の仕事ぶりではなく、仕事そのものの説明に時間をかけすぎること
• 仕事を十分に理解しておらず、説明できない人を選ぶこと
• 「how you know them」の項目を忘れること。この項目が、自分の判断の信頼性を支えます。