Why corporate English training fails
Short answer: Corporate English training usually fails for three reasons. The content is generic, so an engineer writing technical documentation and a banker presenting to clients get the same exercises. Nothing is measured, so no one can tell whether it worked. And the teaching targets grammar, when the actual blocker is almost always confidence and structure under pressure. Fixing all three is not a matter of finding a better teacher. It is a matter of designing the program differently.
The pattern is remarkably consistent
Over the last several years I have been brought in to replace a language program at companies across Southeast Europe. The story is close to identical every time.
The company bought a course. Attendance was fine for six weeks and then declined. Some people enjoyed it. When the renewal came around, nobody could say what had changed, so it was renewed on faith or quietly dropped.
Meanwhile the original problem was still there. People still avoided presenting in English. Emails still went to a manager for a rewrite. Calls with the regional office still ran twice as long as they needed to.
The employees were not the problem. The design was.
Cause one: the content is generic
Most business English courses use the same materials for a software company and a bank. Same book, same exercises, same running order.
But an engineer documenting an API and a relationship manager explaining a fee structure to a client are not doing the same task in the same language. They need different vocabulary, different registers, and different failure modes handled. Teaching them together, from one syllabus, means neither gets what they came for.
What replaces it: content built from the participant's own work. Their meetings, their emails, their reports, their negotiations. If someone is preparing for a quarterly review with a foreign parent company, that review is the lesson. The material should be recognisable to the person sitting in it.
This is also why we match mentors by industry rather than assigning whoever is free. A mentor who has worked in finance knows what a term sheet conversation sounds like and where a non native speaker tends to lose the room.
Cause two: nothing is measured
Ask for evidence and you get attendance. Attendance is not evidence, it is a register.
Without a baseline taken before the first session, there is no honest way to claim improvement afterwards. Without a repeat measurement on the same instrument, there is no way to show direction. And without per dimension detail, a company cannot tell whether it bought more confidence or more accuracy, which are very different purchases.
What replaces it: a diagnostic before anything is taught, repeated on a fixed cycle, reported per dimension and per department. I have written the detail of this in how to measure ROI on corporate English training, including the metrics that survive a conversation with a finance director.
The side effect people underestimate: measurement changes participant behaviour. When someone can see their own structure score move while their vocabulary score does not, the program stops being a scheduled obligation and becomes something they have a stake in.
Cause three: it teaches grammar to people who do not have a grammar problem
This is the one that surprises companies most.
The typical corporate participant has studied English for years. They read it fluently. They understand almost everything in a meeting. On a written test they perform well.
And then they say nothing for forty minutes in a call because by the time they have assembled a sentence they are confident in, the moment has passed.
That is not a grammar gap. It is a fluency and confidence gap, and more grammar drills make it worse, because they reinforce the instinct to check every sentence for correctness before speaking. The person who is worried about being wrong stays quiet. The person who can structure a point quickly, and is comfortable being imperfect while doing it, gets heard.
Perfect grammar does not mean someone can chair a meeting. Chairing a meeting is a separate skill and it has to be practised.
What replaces it: speaking time, deliberately weighted. In our sessions the participant speaks more than 70 percent of the time. The mentor's job is to put them in the situations they actually find difficult and then coach the recovery, not to lecture about the present perfect.
What a program that works looks like
Concretely, four things:
- A baseline before teaching, on an instrument you will use again unchanged.
- Mentors matched to the participant's industry, with the curriculum built from their real work.
- Fixed cycles with a checkpoint, so a program that is drifting gets corrected inside the budget year rather than after it.
- Reporting per dimension and per department, so the company knows what it bought.
None of this is exotic. It is simply a different set of decisions made at the start, and those decisions are almost impossible to retrofit once a program is running.
If you are about to buy
The single most useful thing you can do before signing anything is agree, in writing, what will be measured and when. A provider who is comfortable with that is telling you something. A provider who wants to discuss it later is telling you something too.
The corporate program page sets out how we structure this, and the case studies cover five companies including a telecom operator, an M&A advisory and an industrial group.
