If you’re a healthcare professional with ambitions to move overseas – where do you start?

The OET Test is a globally recognised certificate for healthcare professionals who want to take their careers to new places around the world. The test is recognised by more than 500 healthcare and education organisations worldwide, including regulatory bodies in the United Kingdom, United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. OET’s purpose is to help bridge the gap between healthcare workers and their dreams abroad.

The OET Test is specifically developed for 12 healthcare professionals, including medicine, nursing, dentistry, dietetics, occupational therapy, optometry, pharmacy, physiotherapy, podiatry, radiography, speech pathology, and veterinary science.

This means healthcare professionals taking the OET Test have the opportunity to prove their knowledge and understanding in contexts relevant to their everyday work, making it the ideal choice for doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals.

The OET Test is made up of four sub-tests: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. Preparation is the most important step when it comes to excelling in any exam.

Here are OET’s top tips and resources to prepare for test day shared by Marco Delgado, Chief Experience Officer, Occupational English Test.

LISTENING

This section of the test is designed to evaluate your listening skills, including your ability to gather and understand information, as well as the speaker’s purpose, such as the gist or main idea.

This part of the test takes 40 minutes, is split into three parts and has a total of 42 questions.

Our top tips for the listening exam include:

• Familiarise yourself with the different question types. The listening test has a mix of responses including short answer and sentence completion questions.

• Listen carefully to the question, and answer based on the meaning, not by matching vocabulary.

• Before test day, build your listening practice by listening to English-language podcasts or YouTube videos.

• After listening to the audio, practice writing a one-sentence summary of what you hear to practice your understanding of gist and overall meaning.

OET offers a number of sample listening tests and helpful tips online here.

READING

The reading test assesses comprehension – how well you can understand concepts presented through words and expressing ideas in words. It takes 60 minutes, is split into three parts and has a total of 42 questions.

To prepare yourself for the reading example, follow the tips below:

• Focus on the ‘meaning’ and read with purpose. Practise skimming text and then scanning for specific information. This will help you save time.

• Build your vocabulary and grammar. You’ll be encountering lots of words in the reading test. To understand these texts, you will need to familiarise yourself with complex sentences, subordinating conjunctions, clauses, and more. The good news is, the vocabulary you learn to prepare for the OET Test includes many words you’ll use every day in your new workplace.

• Review your sample tests. After completing your practice tests, carefully check your answers to see why an answer is correct, and why others are incorrect. This will allow you to read carefully and highlight any gaps in vocabulary and grammar knowledge.

The OET Writing and Speaking subtests are profession specific, which means the test materials will reflect real workplace scenarios specific to your profession.

WRITING

The writing section of the OET Test is 45 minutes and requires candidates to write a profession-specific letter based on case notes.

Writing will be marked by criteria, including content, conciseness & clarity, genre & style, organisation & layout, and language.

To prepare yourself for the writing test, try these tips below:

• Use the READER acronym to keep your writing focussed. Find out more about the reader format here.

• Be sure to brush up on your writing skills, including grammar and punctuation and clarity.

All profession specific writing sample tests can be found here.

SPEAKING

The speaking section of the OET Test is approximately 20 minutes and involves two roleplay tasks for each profession. In each task, the candidate takes the role of the professional (for example, as a nurse or as a pharmacist), while the examiner takes the role of a patient, a client, or a patient’s relative or carer. For Veterinary Science, the examiner takes the role of the animal’s owner or carer.

The below resources and tips will help prepare for your role.

• Consider how you should start the role-play and prepare to be flexible based on the context of the situation. This will give the assessors a strong impression of your competency as a healthcare professional communicating with a patient.

• The role play will examine how you demonstrate empathy, active listening, and build relationships. Find out more on how to demonstrate relationship building here.

• Familiarise yourself with the ten common questions asked about the speaking test.

Profession-specific speaking sample tests can be found here.

OET offers a range of free test preparation resources via OET Ready, including sample tests, and blog posts on commonly asked questions.