Social vs academic qualifications - Ielts task 2

Some employers believe that job applicant's social skills are more important than their academic qualifications.

Do you agree or disagree with this opinion?

Both social skills and specialist skills are necessary for our career. Some managing directors assert that the former one plays a more crucial role in recruitment. However, in my opinion, I do not agree with this school of thought and I believe that the more important one depends totally on corporate culture. The following paragraphs will state my perspective more clearly.

Normally, a certificate is not only the first criterion of every applicant to pass the job interview but also a demonstration of your effort and ability after graduating from a long course in the university. The employer may appoint your position based on your certificates. Hence, owning an excellent academic qualification can help us to get a better position in the company and a higher salary, of course. Despite academic qualifications' importance, social skills still remain an irreplaceable factor of employees' success in the workplace. Efficient communication with each other can help the employed person get on well with their colleagues and boost the result of teamwork and bring to him promotion opportunities in the company.

If a qualification can help the candidate to pass the interview, soft skills can promote his career. Both of them are essential but your choice of suitable one is based on your choice of applied company. In the case of a technical corporation, having a qualified technical skill will be the best factor that the recruiters expect. In contrary, in

advertising agencies and brokerages firms, job applicants with wonderful interpersonal skills are prioritized to shortlist. For instance, a humorous and talkative man is more attractive to customers and he is highly appreciated in advertising and selling products.

In conclusion, the belief of a more vital role of social skills in comparison with the applicant's academic qualifications is not always right. We ought to develop the suitable skills so that it can meet the employer's standards and expectations.

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Many thanks for your help

The writing task gives you a full 1 hour to complete your tasks. 20 minutes for the first task, 40 minutes for the second. You are conscious of this time frame going into the test. However, you are not given a timer to go by during the actual exam. You are expected to proper manage your time between the 2 tasks in a manner that will allow you to write an appropriate discussion within a reasonable number of words. As such, writing a particular number of words, within a 20 or 40 minute time frame should become 2nd nature to you as you practice for the test. Practice with a timer. Focus on quality writing not quantity writing. Quantity writing is not helpful to your score and puts you in danger of not completing the essay in a coherent manner before your time runs out. That is why, for task 2 essays, you should not write more than 300 words. While you may not have enough time to correct all the errors in the essay, taking 1 or 2 minutes to actually try and clean up your errors will help you gain a better final score as you lessen the sectional errors you have made in the test. In this case, the word count focus left too many errors in the discussion uncorrected.


This is an example of an uncorrected content focus error. This is a personal opinion and should therefore be stated as the sentence after the writer's opinion. This is because the thesis statement adds to your opinion clarity rather than the empty reference to


There is no sense in stating the obvious to the examiner who will instead deduct points for the lack of clear opinion basis in the paragraph.

Incorrect sentence structures, which could have been improved with editing, were left in place. Word usage is not always accurate, and punctuation marks are often misused. All of these are part of the review and revising process that was not completed because of the word count focus of the presentation. These are the reasons why there will be point deductions throughout as well.

Good points were made and defended in a convincing manner in both reasoning paragraphs. However, you have written too much when you could have said more with less words. That being the point of the task 2 essay. We need conciseness rather than wordiness to increase your score.