What Makes Our OnlineCorporate Language Training Different?
- Customization out the Wazoo
- Insane Relevancy
- In-depth Goals and Progress Report Quarterly
- Relationship-Focused to Support REAL Communication Transformation
And that’s all done with a LIVE instructor!
Your employees can conveniently learn a new language online or improve their skills with a live, private language fluency tutor.
Learning or improving business language skills online is just as effective as in-person lessons, and it costs less. Relevant, interesting conversations are what really matter in language learning – not being in the same room as the instructor.
Fluency Corp’s online language training is taught live by native speakers. Live teachers are just more engaging. Nothing improves a student’s ability to speak a language like talking with a native speaker.
Live instructors also create more accountability than self-paced software programs do. While quality self-paced programs are available and may be less expensive, live tutors will more quickly teach the language skills your employees need on the job. That’s because our language training is based on your employees’ specific responsibilities and challenges.
When Should You Consider OnlineCorporate Language Training?
- When in-person language instruction isn’t available in your area.
- When you want classes outside of typical business hours.
- When you want shorter lessons throughout the week.
- When you travel a lot.
At Fluency Corp, we’re huge advocates of on-site workplace language training. But we also realize that there are times when a native speaker instructor in the language you need just isn’t available in your area, or at a time that is convenient for you. Luckily, technology now makes language instruction by native speakers accessible no matter where you are located or when you need to schedule lessons.
For example, let’s say you are planning to relocate employees to one of your overseas locations. You already have on-site instruction lined up for the employees once they are in their new country. But if you also offer online language training with a live instructor before they leave home, you give them a head start on preparing for their international move. They’ll feel at home more quickly after they move overseas, and that increases the odds that your international relocations (which carry a hefty price tag for your company) will be successful. Your employees will also be able to contribute at work right away, as opposed to being lost for the first 6-12 months (which is typically how long it takes to feel comfortable with the new language). A recent client survey shows that new employees recently relocated to the US lose 5-10 hours a week of productivity their first year in the U.S. This could be avoided!
Another example: Your employees collaborate with colleagues around the globe, including some who speak a different language and come from a different culture. Ideally, you’d like to give your employees time abroad to develop language and cultural fluency. But what if relocations just don’t make sense for your company right now, or you don’t have the budget to send as many employees overseas as you’d like to? Fortunately, you can help employees build fluency without relocating them. And one of the best ways to do that is online language training with a live instructor. They can get basic language and cultural knowledge with just a couple of hours a week on Skype. This will allow employees to better collaborate and communicate with their overseas colleagues.
What Can You Expect During OnlineCorporate Language Training Classes?
First, your employee chooses the best time to have class. We want learning to be convenient for every single one of your employees.
Second, employees fill out an individualized form to discuss their needs. These could include working on confidence during presentations, practicing speaking at meetings, working on more native vocabulary and idioms, improving clarity in pronunciation and ensuring clarity when writing.
Then, we set a start date for the lessons. During the first class, each employee’s fluency partner will ask questions to pinpoint what is relevant and useful for that employee. We write out the goals for the next three months and then send these goals to HR or the employee’s manager. We reassess the goals and send progress reports every three months.
Throughout the course, we constantly make changes to the curriculum. A stagnant curriculum becomes irrelevant, which wastes your time and money. We reassess your employees’ needs during every class: What are they struggling with or need most help with? What will improve their communication and ability to work at 100%?
Employees experience growth starting with their very first week of lessons. We supplement class work with books, TV, radio and other materials that employees can work with at home, all based on their needs.
We recommend a minimum of 26 hours of lessons, but see the most results when at least 52 hours are taken. That’s about six months of taking classes two hours per week. 90% of our clients take 100-200 hours of lessons to get to a native level of speaking with complete confidence while using their new language.
Why Fluency Corp’s OnlineCorporate Language Training Is Different
Fluency Corp’s online language training is so effective is because it includes the same features as our on-site language classes including training with a live instructor.
Online Training with a Live Instructor
Just like our in-person training, our online classes are taught live by native speakers. It doesn’t matter how many recordings your language learners listen to or how many vocabulary lists they memorize if they can’t hold their own in conversations with native speakers. Live online training with an experienced, native-speaker instructor quickly gives your employees the practical, conversational experience they need to do their jobs. (Writing and emails can also be a part of the course if relevant for the participant.)
Customized to Your Needs
Our online language training is fully customized to the needs of your language learners. With “off the rack” self-paced programs, your employees might waste time studying vocabulary and phrases that they’ll never use. Fluency Corp’s instruction focuses on language skills they’ll use every day. We ask your employees about their job, their role, their meetings, their presentations. There’s nothing cookie cutter about our training.
More Than Language
Fluency Corp online classes don’t just teach language skills. Instructors also offer valuable cultural guidance. After all, working or living in a different culture isn’t just about understanding what’s being said around you. It’s also about understanding customs, traditions and etiquette. The comfort – or discomfort – your employees feel in a new culture is an enormous factor in the success or failure of your international relocations.
Highly Personal Training
Don’t under estimate the power of personal connection in online language learning. Even though meetings are virtual instead of in-person, your language learners will still benefit tremendously from working with a live instructor who knows their unique goals and needs, and who cares about their progress. Learning from a live instructor instead of on their own will make your employees more engaged, enthusiastic and accountable as they build their language skills. When you ask most people how they became fluent, they usually cite having made a really good friend, and because of that, they spoke the new language for hours. That’s what we provide – professional language advisors that get your employee TRULY fluent.
Student Examples
Jim
Jim wants to learn Spanish to better communicate with his 60% Spanish-speaking population at work. Even though his employees speak more English than he speaks Spanish, he feels it’s important to connect with them. He decides to take 3 hours of online classes per week: 7-8a.m. Mondays, 5-6 p.m. Wednesdays, and 9-10 a.m. Saturdays. Since he started with no prior knowledge of the language, it will take him 100 hours to become a successful beginner speaker. He’ll be able to have short, basic conversations about himself and others. This will allow him to get to know his coworkers better. We will implement specific job-related vocabulary and even teach him phrases that he can use daily at work. We asked him to write down the words and phrases he uses most each day, so that we can incorporate these phrases into his lessons.
Jin
Jin wants to polish and perfect her English. She’s a senior analyst for a Fortune 100 car company and has been working in Silicon Valley for the past 10 years. For the most part, she easily does her job in English. But she still misses some things in meetings and sometimes gets confused looks from her coworkers, which has made her realize that she’s hard to understand at times.
Since she speaks Korean at home and doesn’t socialize much in English, she has missed out on learning a lot of common words and phrases. She’d like to better understand everyday English as it’s spoken in her workplace, as well as be more easily understood by her coworkers.
As we got to know Jin, and we put together a program for her that consists of phrasal verbs, idioms and American accent training. We’re even working on her emails.
Every class we discuss five new words or phrases, and give her quizzes to ensure she can use them in sentences. We also discuss situations where these phrases would come up. She now watches 10-30 minutes of a sitcom each night as well, writing down new phrases or words that she hears and the context in which she hears them. Since her children are native speakers, she can watch TV with them, so her language learning doesn’t take away from family time.
We also work on accent training about 15 minutes per class, smoothing out her vowels and a few tricky consonants, while also helping her to connect her words more so that it’s easier for native speakers to understand her.
Jin is also listening to talk radio on her way to work now, and gives summaries to her fluency partner in class. Her fluency partner takes notes on her grammar and vocabulary to ensure that her usage is correct. This helps her prepare for meetings when she has to give summaries or updates about work.
We’ve also suggested lunch that Jin have lunch with an American coworker once a week, because she admitted that she mostly sits at her desk for lunch or eats with another Korean coworker. She has promised to reach out to native speakers for lunch to develop deeper friendships.
Her lack of contact with American coworkers stemmed from low confidence in her language skills. But with her fluency partner, she gets more and more confident in her already-outstanding speaking ability with each class she takes. This growing confidence will allow her to speak up more in meetings, share more ideas and be a better collaborator.
Start Online Language Training
Online language training is an exciting option for giving your employees the skills they need to do business across cultures. Contact us for a free consultation or call to learn more about how your employees can study online with Fluency’s Corp’s experienced, native-speaker instructors.
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