Work and Profession

"What do you do?" is one of the first questions anyone asks a new acquaintance, and answering it in Czech quietly forces three grammar decisions at once: which case to put your profession in, which form to use if you're a woman, and which preposition marks your workplace. This page walks through all three so that a simple self-introduction comes out sounding like a native, not a phrasebook.

Asking what someone does

There are two everyday ways to ask, one bookish and one relaxed:

• Čím jste? — literally "By what are you?" Čím is the instrumental of co "what," and the question itself pulls for an instrumental answer.
• Co děláte? — "What do you do?", the most common spoken version.
• Jaké máte povolání? / Jaké máte zaměstnání? — "What is your occupation / job?", slightly more formal, often on forms.

Stating your profession: the instrumental

Here is the part English never prepares you for. When you say what you are by profession, careful Czech puts the profession in the instrumental case, not the nominative:

Why the instrumental? Because Czech treats a profession as a role you occupy, not a fixed equation of identity. The instrumental is the case of "functioning as, serving as." Saying Jsem učitelem frames teaching as the capacity you act in — a role you took up and could one day leave. This is the same logic behind stát se "to become," which always demands the instrumental: you move into a role.

The colloquial nominative

In everyday speech you will hear the nominative just as often: Jsem učitel. This is completely natural and correct in casual conversation — it simply equates "I" with "a teacher" the way English does. The split is one of register, not right-versus-wrong:

The safest habit for a learner: recognise both, and reach for the instrumental when the question was Čím? or when you want to sound careful, and after stát se where it is not optional. The full pattern lives on the instrumental of the predicate page, with the contrasting predicate nominative.

How the instrumental endings look

The pattern is tidy: masculine job nouns take -em (učitel → učitelem), feminine ones ending in -ka take -kou (lékařka → lékařkou). Profession words that are really adjectives in disguise — účetní "accountant," vedoucí "manager," průvodčí "(train) conductor" — barely change and are safe to leave as they are.

Pracovat jako — "to work as"

A second, very common frame sidesteps the case question entirely. After pracovat jako "to work as," the profession goes in the plain nominative:

Note that pracuji (standard/literary) and pracuju (informal, far more common in speech) are the same verb. The word after jako is always nominative — jako means "in the capacity of" and takes the same case as the noun it compares to, here the subject.

Where you work: v versus na

Now the workplace. Czech uses two prepositions, both with the locative case, and choosing between them is partly logical and partly something you simply learn.

v + locative is the default — "inside" a building, company, or enclosed place:

na + locative is used for a specific set of institutions and open or "official" places — and here you mostly have to memorise the list:

The honest summary: v is your default guess and will be right most of the time for companies and buildings. A short closed list — úřad, pošta, univerzita, fakulta, klinika, stavba, nádraží, letiště and the ministries — takes na instead. There is no deep rule that predicts every case, so treat these as vocabulary. The wider treatment, including how the same noun can switch prepositions, is on v vs na for places.

Feminine job titles

Czech almost always has a distinct feminine form of a profession, and using the masculine form about a woman sounds wrong — it is not gender-neutral the way English "doctor" is. The default move is to add -ka to the masculine stem:

Watch the consonant that meets -ka: a stem-final k softens to č (právník → právnička), and -ník often becomes -nice instead (úředník → úřednice "clerk," dělník → dělnice "worker"). A few professions take -yně (přítel → přítelkyně, soudce → soudkyně "judge"). The systematic rules sit on feminine derivation, but the takeaway for now is simple: a woman names her job with the feminine form.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• The careful answer to Čím jste? puts the profession in the instrumental: Jsem učitelem, Je lékařkou. The nominative Jsem učitel is fine in casual speech.
• After stát se "to become," the instrumental is obligatory: stát se lékařem.
• Pracovat jako
  • nominative is the easy escape route: pracuju jako programátor.
• Workplaces split between v + locative (default: v bance, ve firmě, v nemocnici) and a memorised na + locative set (na úřadě, na poště, na univerzitě).
• A woman names her job with the feminine form: učitelka, lékařka, inženýrka.