Add another string to your bow

The market for business English training in Central Europe seems to be on an upward growth curve. The prospect of higher earnings leads many teachers to move into this market, and as a result, competition between trainers and between schools becomes ever more intense.

One proposed method for trainers to deal with this competition is to specialize, particularly in areas in which they already have experience, such as medicine, finance or law. Recent years have seen the establishment of special-interest groups and associations to cater for the needs of trainers in these specific areas (for example EULETA, dealing with legal English; and IATET, for trainers with an interest in technical English).

While I agree on the one hand that securing a niche is one way to deal with competition, I also feel that in the market for business English training, it is necessary for trainers to develop the skills, knowledge and experience to be able to deal with a multitude of clients. And on the networking circuit, the risk of sitting comfortably in your niche is that you may be pigeonholed: “He’s the finance guy” or “Ask X, she does legal English.”

Such skills development needs to be targeted, however. The danger of branching out too widely is that you may spread yourself too thin over too broad a range of areas. The phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none” springs to mind here.

To give you an example of what I mean, I’d like to explain one way that I’ve branched out into a targeted area to broaden my skills and knowledge. After ten years of doing purely in-company training, I made the decision to move into university teaching. My aims for this included enhancing my teaching skills in a new environment, exploiting my own academic background, meeting like-minded people, and absorbing anything else that came along with the experience.

The initial problem was getting a university to offer me a position in the first place. I found myself in the vicious circle of not being suitable for academic teaching because I had no university teaching experience, and not being able to gain that experience because I didn’t have a university job. It only takes one institution to believe in you and offer you the chance to prove yourself to set you on the road to gaining this experience. In my case that institution was Glasgow University.

The course I was working on was called International Pre-Masters in Management. This course is for overseas business students who have been accepted into a Masters in Management programme from September on condition that they pass the pre-sessional course. This is usually because the students’ IELTS grades are below the accepted level and they therefore need additional assistance, not only in vocabulary and grammar, but also in academic terminology and the study skills needed to succeed at a British university.

The first course I did was in the summer of 2009. It comprised two five-week courses, and I don’t know who was more exhausted at the end – me or the students! There was so much for me to learn. As well as finding my way around the logistics and administration involved in working for a new organization, I also had to become familiar with the teaching materials and to manage my time to be able to deal with the volume of students’ essays that needed to be marked.

But the biggest challenge of all for me was learning to work with the strict assessment criteria which would determine whether a student was to pass the course or not (and to deal with those students who didn’t meet the standards). I had never really had to formally “assess” my corporate clients’ skills before. The assessment lay in the task they performed, e.g. in how they dealt with international customers on the telephone, in how confident they were holding a presentation in English, and so forth.

My mind was buzzing all summer long. I felt it was going to explode with the amount of information it was being fed. On the down side, I was concerned that my teaching was not up to my normal standards; as I struggled to come to grips with so many new things, I had the feeling that I was only one step ahead of the students the whole way (and that was only because I had the answer sheets!). It was a challenging experience, but one that I was eager to repeat.

I’ve therefore come back to Glasgow for the 2010 pre-sessional course. What a difference! As I now know the material, the procedures and my colleagues, I am free to concentrate fully on my teaching and, more importantly, on students’ individual needs. By pushing myself beyond my comfort zone last year, I’m now reaping the rewards. And they’re worth it.

When people ask me why I do the pre-sessional course at Glasgow, I tend to quip: “I’m adding more strings to my bow.” But it’s more than that: I pushed the boundaries of my knowledge and skills and was successful. I’ve created synergies between the teaching methods that I use in my different teaching environments. My work has become much more varied and challenging. I’m more motivated. My personal learning network has expanded. I now have contacts in both the corporate and the academic environments, which results in a more diverse range of opinions in discussions of teaching issues.

I remember that at one point in the past I was concerned about spreading myself too thin, but my opinion on this has changed. I’m still specializing, just in more areas than before.