Using my Professional Experience to Teach Business English Online
My Professional Career History
Before I became a TEFL qualified teacher, my working background was in Supply Chain & Accounts. I probably worked equal time in both, about 5 years within the Supply Chain industry and 5 years working as an Accounts Assistant and Assistant Accountant. Both providing different skills and experiences that I have been able to carry forward with my teaching career. This has really helped to build my TEFL career as I am able to teach the skills that I have learnt throughout my professional career to students wanting to learn Business English.
Working in Supply Chain, every day is different, there are lots of different challenges, and problems to solve! It is a great environment and enables you to work with people from across the company along with external suppliers and clients. A lot of different key skills are needed within supply chain; excellent communicator, organised, problem solver, providing excellent customer service, running and engaging in meetings and lots of learning.
Working in accounts, everything follows more of a routine. Lots of reporting which takes place weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. Lots of key skills are still required, but different to those required in supply chain; being highly organised and sticking to deadlines, great communicator – whether with internal staff and colleagues or senior management and company directors, and again being able to lead and engage in meetings.
Tailor Made Business English Classes
I have taught a few students who have an upper intermediate level of English, but do not use the language in day to day life, and want to use the English lessons to build their confidence, whether it’s in speaking, reading or writing or across all areas. As with all my students, a free trial lesson is provided so we can go over each student’s learning needs and I can tailor their lessons accordingly.
For example, I was teaching two brothers based in India who had their own business and had clients based in the UK, US & Canada and wanted to build their confidence speaking and contributing when in various meetings. Their English was Upper Intermediate level, but because they didn’t use the language on a daily basis, when they had business meetings, they didn’t have the confidence to speak up and would sometimes lose track of the conversation due to use of idioms and local slang being used. I tailored lessons specifically around the different stages of meetings and made sure the relevant language and content was covered. This included how to start and end a meeting, managing and running a meeting, keeping the meeting under control, how to carry out brainstorming activities and making sure that action points are made and completed accordingly.
For each stage and lesson, along with my previous experience, I was able to teach the students the key areas to help build their confidence moving forward and help them to run their own meetings when seeing their English speaking clients and suppliers. As well as the different stages of meetings, we also covered business language such as business idioms and slang that may come up as this was one of the areas the students particularly struggled with.
Each lesson focused on a different stage of the meeting and included practice activities so the students could role play the content they had learnt. This was really useful for the students and they enjoyed practicing as it was really relevant to their learning needs and helped them visualise using it in a real-life scenario.
Being able to put my knowledge and experience into lesson planning for these business English lessons was really interesting and enjoyable. It was great to see the students benefit from the skills I had learnt and for them to put it to use for improving their English and watch their confidence grow. I look forward to planning and teaching more business English lessons in the future!