The paper reports on part of a larger scale collaborative and interdisciplinary project among English Applied Studies, Land Surveying and Geo-informatics, and utility specialists industry in engineering in Hong Kong. The present study interviewed 36 utility specialists in Hong Kong to find out their understanding of and perceived importance of communicative competences in English situated in their professional workplaces. The corpora created from the interview data were analysed in several complementary and inter-connected ways, namely word lists, concgram lists, and key semantic fields, to ascertain the kinds of meanings or topical concerns and themes expressed by the professionals when they talked about different types of competences in communication, namely linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, strategic, socio-cultural, and social in their workplace. The project has also achieved effective outcomes in terms of knowledge sharing and exchange with the industry.