English for IT · Level C2

Communicate with mastery at the top of IT: vision and strategy, negotiation and influence, crisis and regulation, expert writing, thought leadership and global teams.

25 hguided learning hours

29lessons

6modules

C2 (CEFR)exit level

About the course

Awarded by: Derstina Ltd (course certificate)
Who it is for: Students and professionals in IT (software development, networks and systems, information security, web design, IT management) who need English at work.
Entry level: C1 English, or completion of English for IT C1.
Delivery: Online and self-paced on phone or laptop, or as part of a class with a teacher. Most lessons follow the same steps: key words, a real work situation, grammar, practice with answers, a speaking task and a writing task.
Guided learning: 23 hours of timed lesson activities plus 2 hours of assessment (25 hours in total). Homework and extra practice are additional.
Progression: Follows English for IT C1. The highest level of the course.

Structure and learning outcomes

By the end of each lesson the learner will be able to:

Module 1: Vision and strategy 4 lessons · 208 min
1	Articulating a technical vision Speaking · Listening · 52 min	Articulate a three-year technical vision in language that is concrete, memorable and honest about trade-offs. Use rhetorical devices such as tricolon and antithesis without tipping into empty corporate rhetoric. Field sceptical questions about a vision while keeping its core intact.
2	Writing an engineering strategy Reading · Writing · 52 min	Distinguish a genuine strategy (diagnosis, guiding policies, coherent actions) from a list of goals. Use nominalisation deliberately and recognise when it hides who is responsible. Write strategy sections that make trade-offs explicit and can be argued with.
3	Communicating technology risk to a board Speaking · Listening · 52 min	Translate technical risk into business exposure that non-technical directors can weigh. Calibrate certainty precisely with hedging, boosting and probability language. Answer hard questions from a board candidly, without either alarming or falsely reassuring it.
4	Technical due diligence in mergers and acquisitions Reading · Vocabulary · 52 min	Read and interpret a technical due diligence report, distinguishing verified findings from management's claims. Use reporting verbs precisely to signal how far you endorse a source. Summarise red flags and their commercial implications for a deal team.
Module 2: Negotiation and influence 4 lessons · 207 min
5	Negotiating enterprise contracts and SLAs Speaking · Listening · 51 min	Explore the interests behind a client's demands before discussing numbers. Trade concessions instead of giving them away, using conditional and inverted structures (provided that, should you, were we to, had you). Negotiate SLA terms such as availability targets, service credits, carve-outs and liability caps with precision and tact.
6	Influencing without authority Reading · Writing · 52 min	Analyse how senior engineers drive change across teams they do not manage. Calibrate the strength of your claims with advanced hedging and boosting, so that you sound neither arrogant nor unsure. Write a proposal to peers that builds a coalition and makes it easy for them to say yes.
7	Navigating organisational politics and conflict Speaking · Listening · 52 min	Recognise the interests, fears and loyalties behind a conflict between senior colleagues. Use modal perfects (should have, could have, might have, needn't have, can't have) to criticise, regret and speculate about the past with precise degrees of directness. Mediate or repair a conflict in a way that lets both sides keep face.
8	Framing and persuasion: the rhetoric of change Reading · Writing · 52 min	Analyse how a senior leader frames a difficult change so that people can accept it. Use rhetorical devices (tricolon, antithesis, anaphora, rhetorical questions and pseudo-clefts) with restraint, so that they persuade rather than manipulate. Write a change announcement that is honest about losses and ends with a clear call to action.
Module 3: Crisis, ethics and accountability 4 lessons · 196 min
9	Public incident communication and blameless post-mortems at scale Writing · Reading · 49 min	Communicate a major incident publicly with candour, precision and an appropriate tone. Choose deliberately between the active and the passive voice, so that grammar signals accountability rather than evading it. Write and critique blameless post-mortems that expose systemic causes without diluting responsibility.
10	Responding to a data breach: regulators, customers and the press Speaking · Listening · 49 min	Coordinate a breach response in English across legal, technical and communications teams. Use precise quantifiers, approximators and evidential hedges to separate what is known, what is suspected and what is not yet known. Tailor the same facts to a regulator, affected users and a journalist without contradiction or spin.
11	Ethics in AI: bias, transparency and responsible engineering Reading · Speaking · 49 min	Discuss bias, fairness and transparency in machine learning systems with precision and nuance. Use concession and counter-argument structures to engage seriously with opposing views before answering them. Argue for or against a responsible-AI decision in a way that persuades sceptics rather than alienating them.
12	Reading and interpreting regulation (GDPR, the EU AI Act) Reading · Vocabulary · 49 min	Read regulatory texts closely, distinguishing obligations, permissions, prohibitions and exceptions. Interpret legal modality and conditional language (shall, may, where, unless, without prejudice to) and explain its practical effect in plain English. Turn regulatory requirements into precise questions for your legal team, without presenting your own reading as legal advice.
Module 4: Writing with precision 4 lessons · 208 min
13	Precision and hedging in technical writing Reading · Writing · 52 min	Distinguish calibrated hedging from vague, defensive writing in technical documents. Use a full range of hedges, boosters and approximators to signal exactly how confident you are and why. Rewrite overclaimed or evasive statements so that they are precise, honest and falsifiable.
14	Writing a white paper Reading · Writing · 52 min	Understand how a white paper differs from marketing copy and from internal documentation. Use nominalisation deliberately, recognising when it adds authority and when it hides agency and meaning. Draft the problem statement and opening argument of a credible, vendor-neutral white paper.
15	Editing other people's writing: line-level feedback Listening · Writing · 52 min	Give precise, line-level feedback that explains why a sentence is hard to read, not just that it is. Use information structure, end-weight and parallelism to diagnose and fix problems in a colleague's text. Edit with restraint, preserving the author's voice and leaving the final decision with them.
16	Executive summaries and one-pagers Reading · Speaking · 52 min	Analyse how an effective one-pager puts the decision, the reasoning and the ask where a busy executive will see them. Use ellipsis, verbless structures and substitution to compress language without losing meaning. Write and deliver an executive summary that leads with the bottom line and states exactly what you need.
Module 5: Thought leadership 4 lessons · 208 min
17	Keynotes and technical storytelling Speaking · Listening · 52 min	Build a keynote around one idea, one story and one memorable image rather than a list of features. Use rhetorical devices such as tricolon, antithesis, anaphora and the rhetorical question with restraint and precision. Judge when rhetoric illuminates an argument and when it merely decorates it or overclaims.
18	Panels and thinking on your feet Speaking · Listening · 52 min	Contribute to a panel discussion with answers that are short, structured and distinctive. Use concession and counter-argument structures (granted, admittedly, be that as it may, adjective + as + clause) to disagree with fellow panellists gracefully but firmly. Buy thinking time, reframe loaded questions and decline to answer what you cannot or should not answer.
19	Media interviews and podcasts Listening · Speaking · 52 min	Prepare for a media interview or podcast with a small set of key messages and the evidence behind each one. Use cleft sentences and other focusing structures to correct false premises and bridge back to what matters without appearing evasive. Recognise traps such as loaded premises, hypothetical questions and offers to speak off the record, and handle them with composure.
20	Shaping engineering culture and values Reading · Writing · 52 min	Analyse how written values shape, or fail to shape, what engineers actually do. Recognise when nominalisation clarifies a concept and when it hides who does what, and rewrite empty abstractions as concrete behaviours and trade-offs. Write a section of a culture document that is specific enough to settle a hard decision.
Module 6: Global leadership 4 lessons · 196 min
21	Leading distributed multicultural teams Reading · Grammar · 49 min	Analyse how decisions and information flow, or fail to flow, across a distributed, multicultural organisation. Use cleft sentences and fronting to place emphasis exactly where you want it. Propose operating principles that make inclusion a matter of design rather than goodwill.
22	Cross-cultural communication: directness and feedback styles Listening · Speaking · 49 min	Diagnose a feedback misunderstanding in terms of intent and impact rather than personality or nationality. Calibrate the force of your feedback with downgraders, upgraders and explicit meta-communication. Propose a working agreement that makes the strength of a comment clear whatever the writer's natural style.
23	Idiom, irony and understatement at work Reading · Vocabulary · 49 min	Interpret understatement, litotes, irony and engineering idioms in workplace messages and recalibrate what they really signal. Use understatement for tact and nuanced evaluation, and switch to plain language when ambiguity would be risky. Check meaning diplomatically when the stakes are high and the signal is unclear.
24	The executive interview: telling your career story Speaking · Writing · 49 min	Tell a concise, coherent career story with a clear through line and inflection points. Reflect on past decisions with modal perfects, mixed conditionals and conditional inversion, balancing ownership with fairness. Answer probing questions from senior interviewers with candour and executive presence.
Word banks 5 lessons · 155 min
25	Word bank: Strategy and governance Vocabulary · 31 min	Learn 30 advanced terms for this topic (Strategy and governance) and use them precisely and naturally in senior-level discussions and writing.
26	Word bank: Negotiation and influence Vocabulary · 31 min	Learn 30 advanced terms for this topic (Negotiation and influence) and use them precisely and naturally in senior-level discussions and writing.
27	Word bank: Risk, law and ethics Vocabulary · 31 min	Learn 30 advanced terms for this topic (Risk, law and ethics) and use them precisely and naturally in senior-level discussions and writing.
28	Word bank: Nuance, idiom and rhetoric Vocabulary · 31 min	Learn 30 advanced terms for this topic (Nuance, idiom and rhetoric) and use them precisely and naturally in senior-level discussions and writing.
29	Word bank: Advanced systems and AI Vocabulary · 31 min	Learn 30 advanced terms for this topic (Advanced systems and AI) and use them precisely and naturally in senior-level discussions and writing.

Assessment

Three assessments at the end of the level. The final test is required for the certificate. The writing and speaking assignments are marked by a Derstina assessor; when both are passed, the certificate records that writing and speaking were assessed.

Final test

20 multiple-choice questions on the level's reading, vocabulary and grammar, drawn from a larger bank and marked on the server. Pass mark 70%. Up to 3 attempts a day; each attempt expires after 2 hours.

Writing assignment: A board paper on a strategic technology decision

The board has asked whether your company should roll out an AI coding assistant to all 300 engineers. Write a paper for the board that sets out a clear recommendation.

The decision in one paragraph: what you recommend and why now.
The evidence for and against, fairly weighed (productivity, quality, security, cost).
The principal risks (including legal and regulatory) and how they would be governed.
How success would be measured, and the conditions under which you would reverse the decision.
The specific decision you are asking the board to take.

400–550 words · about 75 min · marked by a Derstina assessor

Outcomes assessed: Write a persuasive, precisely hedged paper for a non-technical, senior audience. Weigh evidence, risk and governance and make an accountable recommendation.

Criteria (0–3 each): Task achievement, Organisation, Range, Accuracy

Speaking assignment: Open a keynote

You are giving the opening keynote at a regional engineering conference. Record the first two to three minutes of your talk about one hard lesson your organisation learned.

An opening that earns attention (a story, a question or a surprising fact).
The lesson, stated memorably.
Why it matters to this audience, with one concrete example.
A clear signpost of what the rest of the talk will cover.

3–4 minutes recorded · about 25 min · marked by a Derstina assessor

Outcomes assessed: Speak with authority, rhetorical control and natural, engaging delivery. Use storytelling and framing to make a technical message memorable.

Criteria (0–3 each): Task achievement, Fluency and coherence, Range, Pronunciation and accuracy

Marking scale (each criterion)

0 · Not shownNot attempted, off-task, or too little to assess.

1 · Partly metSome evidence, but frequent gaps or errors stop it working at work.

2 · MetDoes the job at this level. Errors do not stop the reader or listener understanding.

3 · Fully metClear, confident and well controlled for this level.

A pass needs at least 8 of 12 and no criterion at 0. Work that does not pass is referred with written feedback, and the learner may submit a new attempt. A second member of staff samples marked work for consistency (internal quality assurance). Learners confirm each submission is their own work.

Certification

Learners who pass the final test receive a Derstina course certificate for English for IT C2, showing the level, the final test score and 25 guided learning hours, and whether the writing and speaking assignments were passed. Each certificate has a unique ID and a QR code; anyone can check it at derstina.com/verify.

This is a Derstina course certificate. It is not an official exam result such as IELTS or TOEFL.