arrow back icon Top Answers

Describe Yourself In An Interview: IELTS Speaking Cue Card

You should say

  • What are your key personality traits?
  • How did you developed it?
  • How it has helped you in career?
  • Have you faced personality testing challenges?
Show all 51 answers

Cue 1:What are your key personality traits?

  • Identify two or three key traits that define you, such as being hardworking, adaptable, or a good communicator.
  • Provide specific examples or situations that demonstrate these traits in action.

Example

I would describe myself as a hardworking and adaptable person. For instance, during my last job, I often took on extra responsibilities to ensure our projects were completed on time. This not only helped my team succeed but also allowed me to learn new skills.

Cue 2:How did you develop it?

  • Discuss experiences or influences that shaped your personality traits, such as education, family, or work experiences.
  • Mention any specific challenges you faced and how you overcame them to develop these traits.

Example

I developed my adaptability through various experiences in college. I was part of a student organization where we often faced unexpected challenges, like last-minute changes in event planning. Learning to think on my feet in those situations helped me become more flexible and resourceful.

Cue 3:How has it helped you in your career?

  • Explain how your personality traits have positively impacted your professional life.
  • Provide examples of situations where these traits led to success or recognition at work.

Example

My hardworking nature has helped me achieve several promotions in my career. For example, when I worked on a critical project, my dedication and attention to detail were recognized by my manager, which led to me being entrusted with more significant responsibilities.

Cue 4:Have you faced personality testing challenges?

  • Share any experiences with personality tests during interviews and how you felt about them.
  • Discuss how you approached these tests and what you learned from them.

Example

Yes, I have faced personality testing challenges during interviews. Initially, I found them quite daunting, but I learned to view them as an opportunity to reflect on my strengths and weaknesses. For instance, one test highlighted my tendency to be overly critical of myself, which I have since worked on to maintain a more balanced perspective.

Conclusion

    Example

    In conclusion, my key personality traits of hard work and adaptability have been instrumental in shaping my career. They have not only helped me overcome challenges but also allowed me to grow and succeed in my professional journey.

    Following this structure will ensure you cover all the essential points while providing a clear and engaging response to the cue card topic.

    Tips to answer this Cue Card

    1: Being Vague About Traits

    Candidates often give vague answers without specific examples. This makes it hard for the examiner to understand your personality.

    bulb icon

    Tip

    Provide clear examples of your traits, such as being 'organized' and explain how this trait manifests in your daily work.

    2: Neglecting Personal Development

    Some candidates fail to explain how they developed their traits, which can make their answers seem superficial.

    bulb icon

    Tip

    Discuss specific experiences or challenges that helped shape your personality traits, such as teamwork or leadership roles.

    Ignoring Career Impact

    Candidates often overlook how their personality traits have positively influenced their careers, missing a key aspect of the question.

    bulb icon

    Tip

    Link your traits to specific career achievements or situations where they helped you succeed, demonstrating their relevance.

    calendar icon

    IELTS Cue Cards asked last week

    Reported by Leap students who gave IELTS

    Describe your favourite food at a traditional festival or a special event in your country
    anonymous person icon

    Reported by

    Anonymous student Band 7.5

    location icon

    Pitampura Test Centre, New Delhi

    Answer

    I like to taste different types of cuisine. Here I would like to talk about my favorite dish at my traditional festival of Onam which is Sadya. Sadya is popular in my city. We are experimenting these cuisines on Onam festival day. Onam is a famous festival in my city. All family members get together in my home and we make a delicious Sadya. There are many ingredients includes that Sadya. Moreover, we make a big feast that day as well as we create a lot of memories together and we wear that day the traditional dress called Sari and men wear the Dhotis. That festival is really important to us because the whole day we are conducting different kinds of games at our homes and all the family members came together. It's a memorable day in my life. This is the festival. We are making the Sambar and Aviyal. These all the kinds of foods are making with the vegetables.
    Talk about a toy you liked in your childhood
    anonymous person icon

    Reported by

    Anonymous student Band 8

    location icon

    Sector 34 Test Centre, Chandigarh

    Answer

    The toy which I liked in my childhood was a panda doll, which makes me pleasant and makes me more blush. The pandas are the most beautiful creatures of the world, which looks gigantic and has pooshy cheeks and they are like stars in the clouds and they dream in me. Furthermore, these have been given by my father. My father is a very very beautiful artistic person, who makes me think of that. Every day you will face every difficulties and make you suffer and move forward. Pandas are always seen in Japanese countries. It is my lifelong dream to visit a Japanese country and click a photo with the original pandas, which makes sounds better.
    Describe a time you were in a place where you didn't know the local language
    anonymous person icon

    Reported by

    Anonymous student Band 6.5

    location icon

    Whitefield Test Center, Bengaluru

    Answer

    As India is a very large country full of diversity, so there are many places which have their own language and speak their native language. The place which I visited and I didn't know about their language was Leladakh, which is about 300 km away from my hometown and it is a very good place as it consists of different kind of trees, animals and have many scenic views and I visited over there last year in summers as it was the best time to visit because it has many, it was cold over there and we had summers in our area so it was the best time to visit over there and I went over there with my whole family.
    Describe a time when your friend damaged something you owned
    anonymous person icon

    Reported by

    Anonymous student Band 7

    location icon

    Begumpet Test Centre, Hyderabad

    Answer

    When I was a kid, I had a little pencil box which had these four buttons which gave the pencil box an operative use. When you press the button, the box would open up. When you press the second button, a little part of it would slide out. Basically it was just a little electronical and a fun thing to have and I owned it when I was in 6th. One day after break, I was standing and talking there with one of my friends and another friend of mine was running through the hallway and accidentally she pushed my shoulder and my pencil box hit the ground and it broke into multiple pieces to the point that it was not functional anymore.
    Describe a book you recently read
    anonymous person icon

    Reported by

    Anonymous student Band 7.5

    location icon

    CBD Belapur Test Centre, Navi Mumbai

    Answer

    It Ends With Us is a book I read recently. It's by the author Colleen Hoare. It's mainly a story about two teenagers, Atlas and Lily, and how they just handle their life going through high school, adolescence, and just domestic violence at home. Both of them come from very, very different families. However, they have one common determining factor between them, which is domestic violence. The abuse that they've seen their moms go through is just insane, and they connect through that on a different level. They're actually in the same high school, but they never speak to each other until Atlas actually crashes into an empty house next to Lily's villa. When Atlas is homeless and he doesn't have anywhere to go, he just comes and breaks into the house next to Lily's, and Lily helps him with all the daily necessities like clothes and food, medicines and stuff. Furthermore, their friendship blossoms into love, but it doesn't really fructify as Atlas has to leave. This book really gave me a lot of knowledge about domestic abuse and how to deal with it.

    All Answers

    Here are all the answers by real-users practicing speaking for IELTS Cue Cards on our IELTS Prep App.

    Band 6

    My key personality traits are that I'm very competitive, not only to my colleagues, but also with myself. So I tend to grow a lot by self-learning and also put my best foot forward whenever I get the opportunity. I developed this trait because I was feeling really on the edge in my career journey.

    Band 6

    My personality traits I would say are not giving up, being consistent and also not fearing to the new challenges which are in front of my face. So, I developed them while learning, while growing in my high school time where I actually faced lot of, lot of time I faced challenges something like learning something entirely new and also at the same time implementing something in it or doing some research, doing some project in it. So at that time I usually had determination in my mind that whatever happens I will not give up. So this, this trait incepted in me right from that point. Also being consistent is one of the, one of the key traits for me because I experienced that it's not about how much motivated you are for a one day or two day. It's more of a how consistent you are in your efforts day to day. So those are the traits which helped me a lot throughout my lifetime. Even in my job, even in my higher education, everywhere it worked a lot. I would say a specific challenge that those traits helped me were during my internship at Offet area where I had to learn backend development I had no idea about in 10 days and also implement, also start a project from scratch in the same area.

    Band 6

    Definitely, my key are my words, I am a very good speaker, I know how to play with words. I can explain any object, any article in a very good simple language. I know how to attract audience, I know how to take their attention. It's quite easy for me to engage people in an activity. My personality is well groomed, I make some rule about my personality and personality and your look play very important role when you are going for any interview, for any party, for any local distribution. So my personality always give me good words and I think I make some rules for all the things. I spend most of my time in sports and gym whenever I am free and book reading help me a lot to engage myself as a perfect personality. According to my personal opinion, books are a great leader for you, if you are engage yourself in reading, they give you a lot of freedom.

    Band 6

    Hello, good morning. My name is Sebin Seji Abraham. I am a B.Pharm graduate. Recently I have cleared my all papers and I am a B.Pharm graduate aspirant and I have worked as a pharmacist for the last 8 months and I have 8 months of experience in retail pharmacy. I think that my key personality is I am a good communicator and I just communicate with the clients and I hope I have cleared all their doubts and I counsel them and I talk about their medical adherence that is when to take the medications, when to take, how to take, the route of administration and what the dosage is and at what time, before and after, all the details about the medicines and as per the doctors prescribe. I just follow as per the prescriptions and I believe that recently I believe that now I am a good communicator and when I compare to before myself because I am an extremely introvert person and I took a decision to overcome that situation and I just fight with me myself so I believe that now I am a good communicator.

    Band 6

    So, the personality trait that I have developed over the years is punctuality. Looking from my perspective, punctuality is a quality that I lacked initially, but now I prefer, I have become more punctual and respect times more as compared to my younger self. Looking back to my younger self, I prefer that punctuality is one of the qualities that everyone should adopt in their life. Punctuality tends to be a thing, personality tends to, punctuality is a personality trait that enhance your overall appearance and increase your level of your knowledge and makes you feel more responsible and tends to make your step closer towards success. Punctuality is the first step you should take in order to respect those, in order to respect your time. And I learned this the hard way, because I have a love for badminton when I was in school, so there was a match for selections for the badminton team, as a result of my habit of getting late, I get late obviously due to this reason, so I missed 3 press selections and even though I have a lot of talent in that sport, I was not able to get selected because of lacking that quality, so over the time I have built this quality after learning the hard way to be respectful towards time, so this was my overall experience related to this personality trait, I prefer, this has changed my life significantly, now I am more confident and it tends to meet my deadlines quite before the time and I have some time to examine my work as well before the time of the deadline, now in my senior high school I have completed all my projects in on time and never have ever created or responded to

    Band 6

    小寶寶 I am very calm and a sharp minded person. I usually love to talk less with so many people because I feel that it will affect on your timing. During my personal development, I learned communication skills as well as good English and vocabulary of many words. Especially when I was a teenager, I felt that I was lacking in communication and my personal development things. I build it on taking one hour of dual training with my professor and with my personal trainer. I build it on during my classroom by taking one hour of permission from my professor. The training is fully based on enhancing communication skills as well as good vocabulary. When I was in my college, I learned good communication skills and after finishing my college, I learned good vocabulary skills. The personal trainer which I hire for one month teach me good vocabulary and other grammatical range of resources like lexical resources and using of good connectors. During my interview preparation, I usually spend one hour extra at morning time and practice a lot of good skills.

    Band 6

    Well, my personal traits are caring, a good communicator and confident. I always feel that I'm caring because I like it when people open up to me and I feel if they rely on me to handle the problem, I need to fix it and I need to conclude the problem well for them. And I developed all of these skills like confident and etc. At the tender age of 6, when I went to a party, I was a bit nervous, I felt a bit shy and I didn't want to socialise so I asked my mom if I could just sit inside the car and I didn't want to go to the party but she said I had to stand up confident and that's when slowly all the traits started coming to me. I've always wanted to become a singer and I think a communicator, caring and confident are the best traits of a great singer and I have also had a lot of personality challenges in this career because whenever people just start giving me bad reviews or just call me out in a bad way, I've always felt that I'm not good enough and I want to step up more but then I know that if I want to become something, I need to stand up confident and that's all. I hope you liked my speech.

    Band 5-6

    If I were to describe myself in an interview, I would say that I try to come up as a very confident and well-sound, well-versed candidate. So firstly, the one thing that really helped me out for cracking interviews for most of the companies that I appeared for was having a great research pre-done before appearing for any interview round. This really gives you an edge on all the other candidates appearing because if we say it is not a very big thing and it is a very generic thing to do but people tend to miss out on just jointing out their information about the company first. And along with that, the other thing that really helped me during the interviews round that I appeared would be having a slight information pre-handed of the interviewer that is going to interview you. That also gives you a little fair knowledge about what questions he may ask or what kind of person.

    Band 5-6

    My key personality traits may include patience and selective attention and time management. By patience I mean having enough patience to deal with different situations like if you are working in a corporate environment, there can be some situations which can impulse you from inside but you should choose what needs your attention and what not. So that's how you manage your time as well because time management is also a very essential skill and that's what I give more of my time to just focus on the work, give less attention to anything negative and just work on what matters on the time, on current time right now. I learned all these skills while I was working in my ex-company. There was a... there was... I was working in my previous company. The environment there was not as suitable for a healthy working environment and then I decided that I should not get affected by the environment else I should learn to ignore the unnecessary events and unnecessary conflicts so that I can manage my time and I can give attention to what requires most of my time. I don't think you should say this. I have given...

    Band 5-6

    My key personality traits are reading, writing and reading books. I love to read books and I have read many books just like Rijda, Pooja and etc. So reading books has been my personality trait as one and I have many more learning habits as well. I am a very very well educated person. I am learning English from like 6 years and I would like to learn English as one of the traits as I have a good experience in English. Whenever I am speaking, it is kind of good.
    1 2 3 4 5 6
    ielts logo

    Get the IELTS Prep App

    Star rating icon

    4.2

    1M+ Installs

     app download banner image

    Get the app link on your phone

    +91

    Or download app from

    google play storeapp store
    master ielts speaking ad