Free online Spanish lessons: learn by yourself

Looking for a job? In this lesson we’re going to learn a little about professions in Spanish language. Before continuing, please check the previous lesson on articles in Spanish.

Following the lesson about personal information, you may want to exchange impressions about the other person’s work and profession. In Spanish as well as in English, there are few questions to ask for professions. In Spanish you can use these questions indistinctly:

¿A qué te dedicas?
¿En qué trabajas?
¿Cuál es tu profesión?

All of them are correct and you can use them as you wish in an informal context. These questions are the equivalent in English of:

What do you do?
What do you do for a living?
What is your profession?

Professions: vocabulary

Have a look at the following table:

Expand table (+)

Download this table in PDF

The nouns of professions in Spanish follow the standard gender rules (see lesson 4 nationalities). As you can observe in the table, some nouns do not change, they keep the same form for female and male. In this case we need to use the article to define the gender. You can see examples of that with the nouns cantante o albañil (un/ una / el/ la cantante).

Professions: Lesson structure

Ok, let’s have a look at the following structure:

(Indefinite) article + profession + verb + en+ (indefinite) article + noun

Un profesor trabaja en un colegio (male)
A teacher works in a school

Una profesora trabaja en un colegio (female)
A teacher works in a school

Sometimes you may use this structure:

(Definite) article + profession + verb + en+ (definite ) article + noun

El médico trabaja en el hospital San Carlos
The doctor works at the hospital San Carlos

Sometimes articles are omitted, and after the preposition “en” you can write directly the name of your company:

Hola, me llamo María, soy profesora y trabajo en TANDEM Madrid.
Hi, my name is María, I am a teacher and I work at TANDEM Madrid.