English has become an established lingua franca among French professionals who work at national and international levels. The language clearly empowers those who use it: it provides access to highly valued, international business situations, as well as to a growing number of jobs where English has become “a must” in the recruitment process. In this article, we present the results of a relatively small, but longitudinal study of English in the French workplace. Our study is based on 1) a quantitative analysis of recently published French job advertisements, 2) an online survey submitted to professionals from several professional backgrounds, and 3) semi-structured interviews of French professionals who use English as a lingua franca. In line with previous studies and frameworks (Louhiala-Salminen, 2002; Bhatia, 2017), our study suggests that competence in English in the workplace cannot be reduced to a set of skills to be used regardless of the context, nor can it be seen as a form of knowledge lying outside professional domains. Rather, our findings tend to show that competence in English may be defined as a form of experience acquired through the exposure to specific professional situations. In these situations, discursive, terminological, and cultural practices are internalized by professionals and sometimes generate specialized language norms which directly suit the professionals’ needs, especially at corporate level. Those norms are not only used in day-to-day practices but also tend to develop into more or less formal standards used in the recruitment process against which other non-native professionals are assessed. English competence in job performance therefore appears as a form of phronesis, or “pratical wisdom”, in which the knowledge of specialized, international situations is used as a set of ad hoc frameworks which are sometimes formalized into pragmatic, corporate-bound standards.