There are two basic ways to ask what someone does for a living: ¿A qué te dedicas? and ¿Qué haces? This lesson will introduce the vocabulary for jobs and occupations and show different ways to create sentences about them. There are lots of examples available and simple explanations on how they work.
We will begin the lesson with a picture showing different jobs and professions – Trabajos y profesiones. These are some occupations people have in most countries regardless of the language. Please read the examples in the picture as we will discuss how they work later so you can make your own. Think of people you have met that have these occupations and you would say that now in Spanish.
It is possible to use different questions to ask what someone does for a living in Spanish including ¿En qué trabajas (tú)?, ¿Cuál es tu trabajo? (what’s your job?), ¿Qué haces(tú)? (what do you do?), and ¿A qué te dedicas? (what do you do?). Most of the time the verbs TRABAJAR (to work), HACER (to do) and DEDICAR (to do for this purpose) will be used for questions of this kind. To ask in a more formal way, we simply change the pronoun TÚ for USTED and the verb forms as in ¿En qué trabaja usted? Notice that the preposition EN is placed before the word QUÉ in the question ¿En que trabaja…? and the preposition A is needed before QUÉ in the question ¿A qué te dedicas? as well. Unlike English, questions in Spanish will use a prepositions at the beginning not at the end. Here are a few examples for you to listen. Try to identify the words for occupations and the different ways to ask about them.
To make sentences about jobs and occupations we often use the irregular in its forms SOY, ES and SON. Most of the time the structure to follow will be
Subject BE occupation (job or occupation)
Since Spanish verbs change depending on the subject, it would be incorrect to say “Yo ser contador” because the verb SER must be changed to SOY to fit YO resulting in “Yo soy contador”. In English, it is possible to use the before an occupation, but this rule does not apply in Spanish. I would sound strange if we said “Yo soy un contador”. Besides, we only use UN or UNA before names of occupations when an adjective is added to describe the person, for example: Es un fotógrafo amable (he is a kind photographer) and Es una secretaria ocupada (she is a busy secretary). Both “amable” and “ocupada” are adjectives. Please listen to a few examples of sentences with jobs (trabajos) following these rules:
Sometimes the verb TRABAJAR plus the word COMO will be used instead of SER to say what someone does, basically adding TRABAJA COMO (works as) after the subject, for example: “Él trabaja como bombero” (He works as a firefighter). The last way to talk about someone’s job is by saying the field they work on instead of their profession, being these fields or CAMPOS words like Mercadeo (marketing), Construcción (construction), Ventas (sales) and others, e.g. “Ana trabaja en mercadeo” (Ana works in marketing) and “Ellos trabajan en construcción” (They work in construction). Here are more examples using some other job names: