Being a colleague. Professional communication — meetings, emails, instant messaging, hybrid and remote working. Time management. Asking for help. Giving and receiving feedback. Working with people who are not like you. Holding boundaries. Handling conflict.
What this includes
- Workplace communication norms — formal vs informal register, written vs spoken, sync vs async
- Meetings — preparing, contributing, listening, taking notes, following up
- Email and messaging — clarity, brevity, tone, audience awareness, what to put in writing and what to take to a conversation
- Time management — managing one’s own work; managing dependencies on others; managing the relationship between estimated and actual time
- Asking for help — when, how, of whom; the difference between asking for help and abdicating the work
- Feedback — receiving without crumbling, giving without flattening, asking for it when it isn’t offered
- Working with difference — colleagues from different backgrounds, generations, neurotypes, communication styles
- Boundaries — saying no, protecting energy, managing scope, what to do when the workload is unsustainable
- Conflict — recognising it, naming it, escalating it appropriately
- Workplace literacy and digital tools — calendars, shared docs, version control, the unwritten rules of how work happens
Tested by
- ASDAN Workright — the closest direct overlay; built around workplace scenarios
- ASDAN Employability — significant portfolio overlap
- FS English L2 — Speaking, Listening and Communication
Cross-curriculum links
- Functional English — Speaking, listening, and communicating (academic equivalent of workplace communication)
- Functional English — Writing (workplace email and report writing)
- Relating Intelligently — Module 2 (questioning patterns at work)
- Relating Intelligently — Module 5 (power, memory, consent in workplace dynamics)
- GIGF — Module 7: Project Governance (RACI matrices and decision rights are workplace-conduct architecture)
Suggested evidence types
- Workplace simulation log (Workright-style scenarios)
- Reflection on a real-or-mock workplace conflict and how it was handled
- Email-register comparison (same situation, three different recipients, three different tones)
- Time-log and reflection on estimated vs actual time across a piece of work