Share this

AN EXECUTIVE BRIEFING FROM EF

How English language skills canpower your global business

STRATEGICENGLISH

Share this

This is about growthIf you’re like most ambitious businesses, you’re looking beyond your home market for growth.That’s good: there’s a massive opportunity to enter new markets, grow existing business and create healthy new revenue streams.But to really succeed in new markets, you need to speak the same language as your prospects – and the single most important language in global business today is English.

It’s time to get strategicImproving your organization’s English language skills delivers significant benefits, including:

• Boosting new international sales• Accelerating market penetration• Increasing customer satisfaction

and loyalty• Reducing cross-border inefficiencies

and costs• Sharing internal knowledge more

effectively• Positioning your brand as a global player

As important as all these things are, many companies still regard their English language training as a low priority, treating it as little more than a ‘tick box’ exercise.

That’s a major opportunity for your company. Because the organizations that treat English learning as a strategic goal, and actively manage it as such, will dramatically out-perform those who take it less seriously.

This brief ebook is about rising to the challenge and seizing this strategic opportunity.

Share this

Introducing Strategic EnglishThe typical approach to English language training is unstructured and unmanaged. It tends to involve:• Sending your people to local courses

(of variable quality)• Giving them access to one-size-fits-

all software• Letting them manage their own progress• Hoping you’re getting return on

investment rather than ensuring it

In short, while many companies agree that English language skills are critical to their success, many still leave them to chance. Research shows that this is a high-risk strategy.

In contrast, more and more companies all over the world are taking a different approach, by investing in Strategic English.

A better wayThere are two key features that characterize Strategic English:

1. Focusing on the vocabulary and English language skills that are the most relevant to your company – presenting, selling, reading, speaking etc. It’s about teaching the right things to the right people.

2. Treating English language development as a key pillar for corporate success – then managing and measuring it accordingly.

Strategic English is about accelerating the language skills of your most important people – from senior executives to customer-facing staff – in a structured program that achieves your company’s specific goals.

More than this, it’s also about opening up new markets, growing market share, selling more and sharing more, delighting customers and increasing productivity.

In short, Strategic English is about accelerating language skills

Share this

The impact of Strategic EnglishStill not convinced? EF recently commissioned an independent, global survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit into how language skills impact the competitiveness of multinational companies.

It’s called Competing Across Borders – and the results are eye-opening. Of just under 600 international companies surveyed:

64% of businesses believe language and cultural differences are constraining their international expansion plans.

Almost half reported that communication misunderstandings have resulted in financial losses.

And nearly nine out of ten report that better international communication skills improve revenues, profits and market share.

With English as the undisputed lingua franca of international business, it is evident that English language skills really do impact your business’s bottom line.

The message is clear: to succeed where your competitors fail, you need to get strategic about English language skills.

Share this

Top-performing companies take their English language skillsseriously. Having worked with hundreds of them over manyyears, we’ve identified six key principles that characterize

a successful, strategic approach to English learning.STRATEGIC ENGLISH…

STARTS WITHGOAL-ORIENTATION

DELIVERSQUALITY AT SCALE

FOCUSES ONRELEVANCE

LEVERAGESTECHNOLOGY

DEMANDSFLEXIBILITY

DELIVERSACCOUNTABILITY

THE PRINCIPLESOF STRATEGIC

ENGLISH

Share this

Share this

STRATEGIC ENGLISH STARTS WITH

GOAL-ORIENTATION

Share this

Share this

Many companies spend a fortune on language training before they realize that they’ve been teaching the wrong things to the wrong people in the wrong ways.An effective Strategic English program always starts with the goals of the business.There are as many goals as there are companies but common drivers for improving English skills include:

• To enter new international markets • To improve the skills of customer-

facing staff• To make sales teams more effective• To drive internal knowledge sharing• To accelerate the careers of top

executives

Starting with business goals is the best way to make the right decisions about who gets training, what kind of training they get, how much you’ll invest and how you’ll measure success.

Program goalsFrom the wider business goals, you can then derive the specific goals of your language training program. These could be along the lines of:

• Teaching your 200 top sales people to present in English within a year

• Moving 70% of call center staff to Level 9 English proficiency by March

• Getting your Finance team comfortable reading the financial press in 30 days

• Making your CEO fluent in English in eight weeks

Goals will vary depending on the roles of the learners and their current skill levels, but the most effective goals are those that include a success metric and a deadline.

Goal-orientation

Key Takeaways

• Before you decide on a budget, strategy, training supplier or methodology, identify the key business goals.

• Develop a set of program goals that map to the overall business goals – and get buy-in from top management.

• Determine specific goals for different roles in the organization: think about who needs what.

Share this

STRATEGIC ENGLISH DELIVERS

QUALITYAT SCALE

Share this

Share this

It’s easy to provide expensive, high-quality personal tuition to a few board members.It’s much harder to progress the English language skills of an entire organization effectively, in a specified time, on a limited budget.

Faced with the challenges of a large-scale English language learning program, many companies fall into the trap of focusing predominantly on minimizing costs and simply go for the cheapest option: buying bulk licenses of generic software or giving everyone a small budget to find their own local training.

These companies soon learn that prioritizing cost over quality is a false economy: they quickly find they’ve spent a lot of money for almost no measurable improvement and any return on investment rapidly disappears. In reality, the cost and quality don’t have to be mutually exclusive; you just need to think strategically. The key to Strategic English is to deliver the highest possible quality of learning experience to the most people.

This means grouping your people according to their needs and looking for solutions that can cater for these different needs effectively. For example, some providers can offer a combination of self-study and teacher-led methods.

Quality at scale

Key Takeaways

• Establish or estimate the highest number of people who would benefit from improved English skills (and deliver benefits to the company).

• Cluster different learner groups according to the value of their English acceleration.

• Think about cost-effective, scalable programs (usually online) for the highest number, mixed with more specialized training (often teacher-led) for the highest priority groups.

Putting Saudi students on the right track for universitySaudi Electronic University (SEU) is an innovative provider of e-learning and distance-learning courses. In particular, they offer an online foundation course to around 6,000 students annually to prepare them for university.

English is a core subject on the course so they turned to EF for a solution that provided the quality of content they needed. With our service and support, SEU students have now taken over 400,000 hours of study. More importantly, around 75% are on track to improve their English more than two EF levels in the year – an excellent rate of progress.

Share this

STRATEGIC ENGLISH FOCUSES ON

RELEVANCE

Share this

Share this

English proficiency isn’t one single skill, it’s a combination of listening comprehension, reading, writing and speaking.In a business context, the skills get even more specialized:

• Sales people need to listen, make presentations and negotiate.

• Technical professionals need to understand industry journals and papers.

• Human resources executives need to be able to converse with candidates and work closely with line-of-business heads.

• Manufacturing workers need to follow the same set of instructions, worldwide, to deliver the same high quality from all plants.

• Furthermore, those working in the pharmaceuticals industry need to know a very different set of vocabulary from those working in aviation.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of English language training programs ignore the specific needs of each learner and the unique demands of their jobs.

Strategic English targets the skills that are most relevant to each learner with task-based learning that’s created for each specific role and the industry you operate in.This fundamental difference multiplies the value of Strategic English training and dramatically accelerates the progress of each learner. They learn faster because the training meets their specific needs.

Relevance

Targeting tasks at Air ChinaAir China has over 36,000 employees serving 60 million domestic and international passengers. It is the most profitable airline in the world.

In a rapidly globalizing market, they know English language skills will be central to future success. Working with them, we designed a training policy and study targets for 1,200 Air China staff, which incorporates teacher-led private and semi-private lessons in EF’s online school, EF Efekta™.

They’ve seen immediate benefits. Just three months after the program started, one manager attended a global conference saying that, had he not taken the courses, he wouldn’t have had the confidence to come to the all-English meeting.

Key Takeaways

• Think about the kind of skills each group of learners needs: what is the optimal mix of reading, writing, listening and speaking?

• Identify the job-related tasks to which each group of learners most needs to apply fluency.

• Choose a training provider with task-based learning content and flexible programs that can be easily customized to each learner.

Share this

STRATEGIC ENGLISH LEVERAGES

TECHNOLOGY

Share this

Share this

For many centuries, languages were taught in classrooms, by teachers.While personal interaction with a great teacher is still a powerful way to develop English language skills, it has limitations for large businesses:

• It’s hard for non-specialists to determine the skill and quality of a teacher.

• In-person teaching is difficult to scale.• Busy professionals often struggle to

find time for pre-scheduled lessons resulting in missed classes.

• Class lessons must aim at an ‘average learner’ rather than adapting for the skills and learning speed of each learner.

There will always be a role for intensive, immersive classes and one-on-one tuition (EF Executive Language Institutes are prime examples). But in-person methods alone can’t meet the needs of global organizations serious about accelerating English skills across the business.

Strategic English leverages technology to deliver flexible, targeted programs that offer best-practice teaching to the widest possible learner base. Technology makes it possible to bring the teacher to the learner wherever they may be via virtual classrooms. Such solutions are more flexible and scalable than traditional in-person training but still retain the human element.

The key is to use technology appropriately rather than to replace all human teachers with software packages.

A hybrid approachUltimately, companies that achieve rapid English acceleration tend to combine self-guided and teacher-led experiences into targeted, scalable programs.

Technology

Key Takeaways

• Think about combining technology with teacher-led learning – in different proportions for different learners.

• Evaluate learning platforms for the richness of their content, relevance of the tasks and exercises and accessibility for all learners.

• Beware of one-size-fits-all software packages that ignore individual differences and entirely remove the teachers.

Online can be personalEF Efekta™ combines task-based interactive self-study with online, teacher-led conversation classes.

It’s the best of both worlds: the self-paced, always-available online experience and the personal engagement of a teacher-led class.

Share this

STRATEGIC ENGLISH DEMANDS

FLEXIBILITY

Share this

Share this

Just as the needs of each learner are different, their availability to study varies widely too:One CEO knows she will never fit English study into her busy schedule.She needs an intensive, residential program that gets her away from day-to-day activities for anything from a week to a month.

A time-poor sales executive can only fit English study into narrow windows throughout the day.He needs an online program he can access from his smartphone.

A call center agent can only practice her English for half an hour on lunch breaks.She needs a self-guided study program supplemented by one online conversation class per week.

We’ve seen it time and time again: flexible programs designed to fit with each learner’s schedule achieve much higher participation and success rates.

Strategic English is about a solution that is flexible enough to adapt to the way each learner needs to learn.Inflexible programs invariably see the greatest drop-out rates and slowest skill development – a fast-track to poor results and disappointing ROI.

Flexibility

Key Takeaways

• Ask your people how they most want to learn and when they expect to fit in their study time.

• Use online programs to fit around each learner’s schedule.

• For the fastest acceleration, consider offering senior executives intensive, residential programs.

Share this

STRATEGIC ENGLISH DELIVERS

ACCOUNTABILITY

Share this

Share this

The learner is not the ultimate customer of a Strategic English program: the organization itself is.Many large companies spend millions on English language without ever tracking the return on that investment.

• They take it on trust that each learner is attending classes or using their software.

• They assume that participation equals progress.

• They simply hope their investment is delivering real benefits to the business.

Strategic English programs measure the participation and progress of each learner and report regularly on goal achievement and ROI.It’s one thing to say “We bought software for 100 people.” It’s quite another to say, “These 50 people spent eight hours a week in online learning for four straight weeks and have progressed 10%. But these ten haven’t logged in for a month.”

Accountability

Key Takeaways

• Make sure whichever learning provider you choose can track your key metrics.

• Don’t just measure participation, measure progress too.

• Track the entire program against your goals – not just each learner’s progress.

Share this

GOAL-ORIENTATIONEstablish your program

goals based on yourbusiness goals.

QUALITY AT SCALEDon’t let the sheer number

of learners make yousacrifice the quality oflearning experience.

RELEVANCEMake sure each learner

is learning the rightskills and job-related tasks.

TECHNOLOGYThe right technology

platform can acceleratethe entire program.

FLEXIBILITYMake sure your learning

programs fit aroundthe people who need

to progress.

ACCOUNTABILITYSet up participation

and progress metrics– and track them.

THE PRINCIPLESOF STRATEGIC

ENGLISH

Recap

Share this

Share this

The world’s most successful companies recognize that English language skills are simply too important to leave to chance.For them, Strategic English is a secret growth driver that sets them apart from their international competitors.Faster, more effective English language development leads to a more confident, more effective organization, ready to assert itself on the global stage.Sales people sell more. Customer service people understand customers better. Deal-makers close better deals. And market share, revenues and profits follow.In short: it’s time to get strategic.

Conclusion

“ More than two thirds of executives agree that their workforce needs to be proficient in English in order to make cross-border teams function efficiently.”Competing Across Borders report The Economist Intelligence Unit

Share this

Corporate Language Learning SolutionsEF Corporate Language Learning Solutions delivers online, cloud-based learning experiences with the Efekta™ school and runs Executive Language Institutes in Boston, USA and Cambridge, UK.

Our EF Method™ is the fastest way to improve English proficiency and our Learning Logistics™ approach maximizes the return on your investment in English learning.

Further ReadingThe Economist Intelligence Unit’s Competing Across Borders: How cultural and communication barriers affect business. An independent, global survey into how language skills impact the competitiveness of multinational companies.

The EF Efekta™ Cloud School Discover our powerful online learning experience.

EF Executive Language Institutes Learn about our immersive residential programs.

The EF Method™ Learn about our unique approach to English language learning.

Get our Brochure All you need to know about EF Corporate Language Learning Solutions.

www.ef-solutions.com

About EF

Our EF Method™ is the fastest way to improve English proficiency and our Learning Logistics™ approach maximizes the return on your investment in English learning.

Share this