Job-focused Business English Training

Last week I was in Berlin to give a presentation at a conference called “Sprachen und Beruf” or Languages and Business. My presentation got me thinking (and hopefully it got the audience thinking too). A large part of my presentation was dedicated to the goals of job-focused Business English training from the perspective of our participants, the clients (managers) and the training managers. In other words, what sort of training do our customers really want?

We included video interviews with the various stakeholders in the presentation. When I sat down and watched all of the videos, including the out-takes and the drafts, it was obvious that there was a very strong recurring theme throughout.

Quite simply, and this will probably sound obvious, our customers who buy our InCorporate Trainer concept want job-focused training. So far so good, but, more to the point, they want training directly focused on what they do in English in their jobs. OK, still nothing really new here. But, what did they really want?

What managers want with their English training

Universally, what they wanted was:

  • focus only on the skills that they actually use for their jobs
  • integration of their own documents, emails and presentations in the training material
  • activities that reflected what they actually had to do in the workplace
  • training to do what they do on the job better, not simply training to improve their knowledge

Without consciously thinking about it, the participants and clients (managers) were highlighting the importance of relevance on transferability. This is a core concept in the InCorporate training model. The training should reflect what the trainer sees on a daily basis. The ideas for the training should come from the on-the-job support that the trainer does on a daily basis. The role-plays and activities should be as close as possible to the real meetings, presentations and phone calls going on in the office.

By creating and running this sort of training, the learner can more easily apply the learning. Sure, if you watch a lot of English movies, eventually your vocabulary will improve. But, taking that learning and applying it to improve your negotiations at work is another matter.

The training really needs to reflect not just the real world, but it needs to reflect the learner’s real world. The literature and research supports this concept – “relevance aids transferability”. But, it sure is nice to hear that the participants and managers instinctively know this too.

On-the-job Training in Action

On-the- job training can be hard to imagine for many of our new Business English trainers. What exactly  is  the DMAIC cycle? And what does on-the-job training really mean. We’re going to regularly update you on some of the on-the-job work we’ve been doing each month to give you a clearer idea. Most of us deal with a wide range of material, and all of us have signed confidentiality clauses as we are privy to some really confidential information.

So, what do we actually do?

Without showing you the texts we’re given it’s difficult to be specific about this, but let me try anyway. The idea is that we aim to help as quickly as possible, so as trainers we need to be as flexible as possible and accept that we might never be able to achieve what we set out to do at the beginning of the day as our agenda gets shifted by the clients’ needs. As an example, here are a few things I did in terms of on-the-job work last week:

A) I helped someone with their email correspondence to a demanding partner in the States (in this email chain the tone was becoming increasingly heated and it was particularly important to achieve a firm but not overly direct tone — the American was also getting a bit wound up, but I couldn’t do much about that).

B) I helped someone review a draft of a circular regarding an update on the status of a project, and informing everyone across the company that they need to adhere to the attached guidelines. This circular is to be sent out by a board member to all divisions in a multinational — understandably, my participant was keen to make sure that the English was perfect both in terms of style and accuracy.

C) A new lady joined one department I work in this month and has to give two presentations next week in English to senior management. As you can imagine, she’s nervous. She prepared what she wanted to say in advance of our meeting, and we went through it with her giving the presentation the way she had planned to (which was pretty good) . This gave me an opportunity to pick up on any errors that were important to her overall performance but, perhaps more importantly, consider how she could improve the level of language she was using to further improve her style. I gave her relevant feedback, and she did the presentation again.

Why do we do it like this?

Because we’re really able to help the clients with exactly what they need — and in combination with classroom training based not on coursebook content, but rather on their real and changing needs — we can help them directly.

What does the client get out of it?

To name but a few: a boost in confidence, the certainty that documents they are producing or presentations they are giving are really accurate, an improved image, credit from their bosses — the list goes on.

What does the trainer get out of it?

The certainty that what you are covering, whether it is in the on-the-job interactions or in training sessions, is immediately relevant and useful. However much you supplement, you are never going to get the same feeling by working your way through a coursebook.

The reward of having really helped them and the resulting level of motivation; the excitement of actually seeing them put what you’ve taught into action. I can’t wait for next Wednesday, as I’m going to a training session on process changes that two of my participants have prepared with me for over a hundred people. They’ve already run it with confidence in the States, Brazil and China, and this is the European session. I think I’m more nervous than they are, and the added bonus is that it’s going to give me bags of material for our training sessions over the next few weeks! Next time, I’ll let you know how it went.

 

 

Presentations: Three Mistakes Even Experienced Presenters Make

A few weeks ago I was coaching two partners at a financial service provider on their presentations.  They were looking to present a new innovative investment product at a series of upcoming client meetings, and together we were sharpening their  message and the delivery.  They did a great job.

It was quarter past six, the end of a very long day, when Jean-Paul, one of the junior specialists, popped into the meeting room.  He’d been waiting patiently outside.  “I wish I could have some sort of presentations training like this, but I’ve only just started here.  Can you give me any tips or tricks?”

Apart from being suitably flattered, I was also, unfortunately, very tired with a 3 hour Friday rush hour drive ahead of me.  We talked a little about his experience and as I knew I’d be back within the next 2 weeks, I suggested I sent Jean-Paul some handy materials and then we could carve out 30 minutes for a coffee next time.

Stuck in traffic 45 minutes later my thoughts began to go over Jean-Paul ‘s question -“Can you give me any tips or tricks on making presentations? “ . Sure, we have a library of resources, examples and suggested reading  – but this didn’t seem to sit well with me. Then I began to reflect on the day itself – here we had a fresh, ambitious and young professional looking to build his presentations to a level comparable to the partners (his hopefully future-self).  The reality is though that regardless of training and experience, many of us still make fundamental mistakes when presenting due to time pressure and prioritization.  Perhaps the most valuable thing I could offer Jean-Paul was to highlight this and try to ensure he kept this in mind as his career, responsibility, workload and pressures increased.

So Jean-Paul, this one’s for you …

Simple mistakes we make in presentations – and how to avoid them

Know your whats AND whys – Incredibly obvious-  but too often when the presentation is just one among many tasks you have to get done, even the most experienced professionals start thinking about  content and structure before they have crystallized  what they want to achieve with the presentation.

An excellent tip is to write down in a single sentence what your presentation is about and why you are presenting.  If you can’t do it in 14 words or less, rewrite it – and one of the 14 words needs to be the powerful “so”. e.g.  I’m sharing three mistakes that even experienced presenters make so you don’t make them .  My first stab at this sentence came in at twenty-eight words- there was a lot of fluff to remove. Now I have a very simple framework to move forward, and clear criteria for what I want to put in and take out.

Complete your presentation before you go anywhere near slides – This one is a killer and everyone has done it. We know we have to make a presentation and the first reaction is to start looking at existing slide sets and begin copy and pasting them into a “new presentation” –  we start thinking in slides, and build our presentations around our visual aids (as opposed to our visuals aiding the presentation).  Plan your presentation and, dare I say it, practice it out loud BEFORE you go anywhere near your slides.

Perhaps the comedic writers Steve Lowe and Brendan McArthur[1] best summed it up – “PowerPoint: The Microsoft tool that encourages people to think and talk like ********s.”

Be comfortable with what you are doing – Your audience’s reaction to you is as important as the content itself. When you come across as unsure of yourself or uncertain of your content you are creating barriers to success.  Now I accept this is a huge developmental area so here is a concrete tip for presenters that even the most seasoned presenters know, and sometimes forget, to follow:

Practice. Practice out loud.  Practice is not thinking to yourself what you could say – it’s actually saying it.  Practice in front of a mirror. Practice your presentation a day before you hold it -if you start practicing an hour before you run the real risk of deciding to change things around which makes things harder.

So Jean-Paul, keep those three points in mind and your presentations will be both effective and memorable.


[1] Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?: Insanely Annoying Modern Things – By Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur with Brendan Hay (Grand Central Publishing)