IELTS Speaking Part 3: Courses
4 Part 3 discussion questions on courses, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
What are the advantages of taking a short course compared to formal, long-term education?
The obvious advantage is the cost, in time as much as money. A short course lets you acquire one specific skill in a matter of weeks without committing three or four years and a great deal of money to a full degree, which makes it realistic for someone already working. You can also take it while keeping your job, so you are not giving up an income in order to learn something. The advantage people mention less is that short courses stay current. In a fast-moving field, a university curriculum takes years to approve and revise, so parts of it are already dated by the time it reaches students, whereas a short course can be rewritten between one intake and the next. What you lose, of course, is the depth and breadth a degree provides, so the two are not really competing for the same purpose.
Is it better to learn a new skill from a course or by teaching yourself?
A course is much better at the beginning, and the reason is correction rather than content. Almost everything is available free online now, so what you are really paying for is somebody who notices you are doing it wrong and tells you before the mistake becomes a habit. A course also supplies the order, which is genuinely hard to work out for yourself, since a beginner has no way of knowing which topic needs to come before which. Teaching yourself works better once those foundations are in place. By then you know enough to judge what you actually need, so you can skip what is irrelevant and spend the time on the part you find difficult, which no fixed syllabus will do for you. In practice most people who get good at something do both, in that order. The mistake is staying in courses indefinitely, long after you know enough to direct your own learning and would progress faster alone.
Why do adults choose to take courses to learn new skills nowadays?
The main driver is that skills now date faster than careers do. Someone who trained twenty years ago cannot rely on that training carrying them to retirement, because whole tools and methods have been replaced since, so taking a course every few years has become a normal part of staying employable rather than something only ambitious people do. A good deal of it is defensive: people are protecting the job they already have, not chasing a new one. The second reason is simply that it became possible. Twenty years ago studying alongside a full-time job meant evening classes at a fixed hour in a fixed place, which ruled it out for anyone with children or shift work. Online platforms removed all of that, so a course can now be fitted around whatever time a person actually has. Plenty of adults now also take courses with no career purpose at all, purely out of interest, which was rarely practical before.
What kinds of courses are most popular in your country?
Technology courses dominate, particularly coding, web development and digital marketing. The reason is straightforward economics: those are the fields where employers are visibly short of people and where the salaries are high enough to justify the effort, and they are also fields you can enter without a relevant degree, which matters enormously to anyone changing career in their thirties. The other genuinely large category is languages, and English above all. Here it functions as a gateway rather than a skill in its own right, because it decides whether someone can study abroad, work for an international company or even follow the training materials in their own field. Parents start children on it early for exactly that reason, and adults who missed out come back to it later. That is why language schools here stay full even when the economy is weak, and why English tuition is one of the last things a family cuts.
Reading a model answer is not the same as saying one. The sample above shows what a strong Part 3 answer sounds like. What it cannot tell you is how yours sounds — whether you hesitate, repeat the question back, or run out of things to say at forty seconds.
You can record an answer to this exact question and get it marked on fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and pronunciation — the same four criteria the examiner uses.
Common questions
How is Part 3 different from Part 1?
Part 1 is about you; Part 3 is about people in general. The questions move to society, causes and consequences, and the answers are expected to be longer and more developed — an opinion plus a reason plus an example, rather than two sentences.
What if I have no opinion on the question?
You are not marked on the opinion, so pick one and support it. Saying you have never thought about it and stopping there leaves the examiner nothing to assess.
How long does Part 3 last?
Four to five minutes. The topics develop out of your Part 2 card, so the discussion is usually connected to what you just described.
Model answers written and reviewed by The English All-in-One IELTS team. They are teaching models showing what each band looks like, not real candidate scripts.