Professional & business

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

Professional Serbian: from the job ad to the meeting

The lesson “Work & study” gave you jobs, a short interview scene and the words of the office: posao, firma, plata, kancelarija. This one is the Serbian of working life: reading a job ad and a contract, seeing why your pay always has two figures, taking leave or sick leave, running a meeting, writing to a colleague and disagreeing with your boss politely.

The job ad and the contract: oglas, ugovor o radu

Jobs are found through an ad, an oglas za posao; a school, a hospital or a ministry announces a konkurs, an open call for applicants. You apply with a prijava (application) and a CV or biografija: in a job ad that word means your CV, not a life story. The shortlisted are invited to a razgovor za posao, literally “a talk for a job”: the job interview. The CV and the interview itself come in “CV & cover letter” and “Interviews & formal encounters”.

Tražimo saradnika u prodaji. Nudimo ugovor na neodređeno nakon probnog rada i platu od 120.000 dinara neto. CV slati do 15. novembra. We are looking for a sales associate. We offer a permanent contract after a probation period and a salary of 120,000 dinars net. Send your CV by 15 November.

Once you sign, you are in a radni odnos, an employment relationship, whose two parties are the poslodavac “employer” and the zaposleni “employee” (literally “employed”). The rest of the contract is in the table.

Keep ugovor “the signed document, a contract” apart from dogovor “an agreement, an arrangement, more often a spoken one”: you sign an ugovor, you come to a dogovor. You can also work for yourself. A freelancer registers as a preduzetnik, a sole trader (pr after the name), a company as a d.o.o., a limited company. Both are entered in the APR business register, have a PIB tax number and a business bank account, a poslovni račun; they send each client a faktura (invoice), and a freelancer often pays a flat-rate tax, paušalno oporezivanje (the abbreviations are in “Abbreviations & acronyms”).

Pay: plata and zarada, bruto and neto

In conversation your pay is plata; the law, the contract and the payslip call it zarada “earnings”. There are always two sums: bruto is the amount before deductions, what English calls gross; neto is what you take home, the net. The difference is porez “tax” and doprinosi “social contributions”. The law and the contract count pay gross, while people, and many ads, name the net figure; that is why a job offer often gives both, and if it gives one, ask which. Where English has a raise and a promotion, Serbian also has two words: povišica is more money, unapređenje a higher post.

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

Professional Serbian

Work and contract

Money

Leave and leaving

Meetings and email

Speaking at work