Teaching “corporate” students

Through our professional path, we often get the chance to experiment teaching new courses, try out new spheres of expertise, work with different people having different backgrounds and specialties. This gives us a chance to become better professionals, to polish our skills and to gain new knowledge on the go.

In my years of teaching experience, I’ve had a chance and the pleasure to work with people having different professions, from various companies (I call them “corporate” students hereinafter) and that’s what I’d like to share here.

A lot of businesses nowadays are striving to have a well educated staff, equipped with not only skills and knowledge in their immediate expertise, but also more global skills like, communication, languages, time management, etc. Hence, most of those companies are ready and happy to invest in the development of their workforce to achieve better results in the future. This is the reason they finance different training courses for their employees and send them to study. And here is where I had a great chance to work with people from different business sectors, as the training company I used to work with was and is still offering language courses for corporate clients.

What I thought?

In early years of teaching I used to think that all teaching is the same, all the classrooms are the same, most of the time the material we cover is also the same. The only thing that changes are the students/the audience and it doesn’t/shouldn’t change the flow of the lesson, the course materials, the approach in general and so on. To my belief, being a “universal” teacher was a very cool thing, someone who could teach anytime, anywhere and everyone who wanted to.

This was my belief at least for the first two Business English A2+ groups I used to teach from the same company.

What I learnt?

It didn’t take long for me to realize that what I thought about teaching in the first place, was a misconception. Of course, groups of the same language level and coming from the same company would be much alike in language competence and company culture, hence, it could be misleading for a starting-up teacher to look a bit ahead.

As soon as I started to teach a different group with a higher language level and coming from different companies much became clear for me:

1. You can’t teach everyone using the same methodologies, approach and material.
2. You need to consider the individual differences of the students (even though they’re adults).
3. You definitely need to vary your lesson flow and course materials depending on the needs of your students.

Needs and challenges

The main business areas I have been working with have been the banking sphere, financial sphere in general, the medical sector, the IT industries and the telecommunication sector.

Depending on the professional sphere the “corporate” students come from, they have different goals set for them to reach when completing a language course. Hence, the focus of the lesson, the package of the skills and the approach in choosing lesson activities should vary.

There are two specific types of students from the corporate sector; front staff — those working with the customers, and the back office — focused on internal communication, managerial meetings (very often in a foreign language).

Needs for these two types of learners differ. The front staff needs to acquire more language in communicating with the customers, offering them the products the company suggests, selling them some services, etc.

The activities that work great here are:

• role-plays (customer/employee),
• situational simulations (handling a difficult customer, selling a service, etc),
• managing polite and friendly conversations,
• passing customer interviews (for the IT sector),
• conducting a demo sessions of a product,
• conducting a small talk.

The challenges here are the scarcity of materials, as not all the situational role-plays offered on the Internet can suit the cultural and individual differences of your students. The best solution here, is to ask the students to bring the cases they have to deal with at work to the classroom (keeping the rules of confidentiality) and building up a dialogue based on them. This will give you a chance to have a variety of scenarios, no preparation time required and real case studies which are much better remembered than imaginary situations.

As for the back office, mainly the managerial staff, the main goal I’ve been working with so far has been to improve negotiation skills, internal communication with colleagues, conducting face to face meetings, etc.

The activities that work really well here are:

• role plays (manager/employee, manager/prospective partner),
• negotiations to come to a unanimous decision,
• job interview simulations, etc.,
• landing foreign projects (for the IT sector),
• debating a solution,
• showing active listening strategies,
• writing a report, a proposal.

The biggest challenge I have been facing here has and I believe will always be making sure that the students feel comfortable working with each other and sharing some information. At first, people at the managerial level will find it difficult to open up, to trust each other and the teacher, let alone to engage in a dialogue. You’ll first need to gain their trust more rigorously than it would have been with other ordinary employees. To achieve that, the best trick that works is to ensure that whatever dialogue, simulation they have to work with are done only to improve their language skills, not their managerial skills. So, whatever solution they come up with is OK to you (as you’re not a specialist in management) and all you care about is the language they produce. This will create a comfort zone for them and they will become more and more relaxed and easy to work with as the course goes.

What you need to know

1. Before you start a course, study your target audience, learn as much as possible about their business sector, polish your language in that sector.
2. Remember, you are not teaching them their profession, so avoid engaging in debates in a sphere where they can beat you, focus on the language instead.
3. Create course materials as close to the reality as possible, use the students’ own experience whenever possible.
4. Be ready to provide a report to the company that is financing their studies based on their progress, course attendance, results, etc.
5. Relax and have fun! At the end of the day, you also learn a lot from them.

A small treat

There are different resources that you can use to find role-plays, language exercises and other materials to use for custom-made corporate courses. Here are some that I have been using for a long time and they have never failed me.

Communication Games Business

Five Minute Activities for Business English

Test your Business Vocabulary in Use

Business English Role Plays

We believe you will want to share your experience when working with “corporate” students and the challenges you’ve ever faced.