The technical nouns of a field are the part you already have. They are borrowed, cognate or identical across languages more often than not, and anybody working in a subject knows its objects. What is missing is the verbs: what happens to those objects, who does it, and what state a thing is in while it waits.
Escalate, sign off, roll back, scope, chase, park, flag, bottom out. None of those is technical vocabulary and all of them are in every second message, and no glossary of your industry contains one of them.
Eight moves for the English you actually need
- technical English is easier than small talk, because the vocabulary is finite, shared with your own language in many fields, and used precisely.
- learn the fifty nouns of your field first. In most professions a few dozen terms account for the majority of specialist vocabulary in a working day.
- the verbs are ordinary. Around those nouns sit run, set, raise, drop and check, which you already have.
- collect the field's collocations. It is run a test and raise an issue, and the noun alone will not tell you which verb it takes.
- translate your own job description as a first exercise, since it contains almost every word you will need to say about yourself.
- read one paper in your field aloud, which teaches the register and the pronunciation of the terms at the same time.
- abbreviations are pronounced two ways, either spelled out or said as a word, and which one is fixed by convention rather than by rule.
- your field has a house style, and reading three recent documents from your own organisation tells you more than any general course.
Process vocabulary is what a workplace runs on
Most of what gets said at work is about the movement of things rather than about the things. A request is raised, assigned, chased, escalated, parked and closed. A document is drafted, circulated, signed off and superseded. Those verbs carry the entire status of the work, and being unsure of one of them means being unsure what somebody has just told you to do.
They are also almost all phrasal, which is why they are hard in a specific way rather than in a general one. The particle carries the meaning, the pieces are ordinary words, and a learner who knows every word in bottom out can still have no idea what happened.
A field's list is small and its finish line is real
This is the good news that general vocabulary never offers. The set is a couple of hundred items, it repeats every day, and unlike general vocabulary it can actually be completed. A fortnight of deliberate collection covers most of what you will need for years in the same role.
The reason it is worth collecting deliberately rather than absorbing is the frequency: these words come up constantly, so a gap in the list costs you several times a week, and the same gap in general vocabulary might cost you once a month.
Where it stops: building a glossary of nouns
The stall is collecting the wrong half. A learner starting a job in English makes a list of the technical terms, because those are the words that look like specialist vocabulary and because they are the ones a glossary contains.
Most of that list was already known. Meanwhile the message that says can you chase this and flag anything that looks off before it gets signed off contains no technical vocabulary at all and is the sentence that was not understood.
Nothing corrects it because the failure is silent. Not understanding a technical term produces an obvious question. Not understanding chase produces a guess, and the guess is usually close enough that nothing goes visibly wrong, which is exactly how the gap survives for years.
Reading your own workplace's dialect off its own record
Search your team's chat tool for a week's worth of messages and write down the verbs that repeat. That produces a list specific to the place you actually work, in the words your actual colleagues use, which is a different and better list than any industry glossary.
It replaced the business English glossary, which lists a sector's nouns and none of a team's verbs, and which was assembled from published material rather than from how anybody talks.
Two limitations. It is your workplace's dialect, so some of it is local and will not transfer to the next job, and the record belongs to your employer, which is worth remembering before you paste it anywhere. Collect the words rather than the messages.
What it looks like when it goes wrong
The recognisable failure is doing the wrong thing confidently after a clear instruction. Nothing in the message was ambiguous to anybody else, and one phrasal verb was guessed at, and the guess pointed the other way: park it means stop for now and push it means move the date, and a person who has them the wrong way round will be busy on the wrong thing until somebody notices.
The second is over-formality in exactly this vocabulary. A learner who has avoided phrasal verbs writes please postpone this item where the team says let's park it, and is understood perfectly and marked as slightly outside.
The reason the particle rather than the verb carries the meaning in almost all of these is get up, put off, run into: verbs a preposition rewrites, and the words that repeat in the adverts for the job above yours are the ones worth adding next, which is the English that decides whether you get the role.
The open question is what to do with a list once it exists, since a couple of hundred items met once are a couple of hundred items forgotten, and the schedule that keeps them is the same one that keeps anything else: why words vanish, and the schedule that keeps them.