GlobalEnglish Understands International Business Relations
GlobalEnglish provides a communication solution for international businesses.
A leading provider of on-demand development and support for Business English communication, Global English last March, unveiled the findings from a newly launched Business English Index (BEI). This index revealed a disappointing international communication situation, concluding an insufficiency in Business English competency that is detrimental to the transaction of global business.
BEI judges Business English competency on a scale from 1-10 based on the company’s core service, The GlobalEnglish Corporate Learning Service™. The 2011 BEI was 4.46. “This translates into a workforce that can understand only basic information on the telephone or in person, but cannot understand most business presentations, take a leadership role in business discussions, or perform relatively complex tasks,” said Tom Kahl, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales at GlobalEnglish in an interview with Business Review Canada.
To come to this conclusion, GlobalEnglish conducted a survey of more than 105,000 global employees in 152 countries across a range of industries. “Our goal was to understand how competent global workers are using English in the workplace,” said Kahl.
Kahl joined GlobalEnglish because of miscommunication issues he was seeing in the workplace. “Prior to GlobalEnglish, I worked in London and was responsible for the EMEA region for another software company. Miscommunication has a massive impact on productivity and I personally spent countless hours clarifying information and re-writing documents for my colleagues who struggled with business English. That was 10 years ago. The impact of miscommunication has amplified tenfold since then. Here at GlobalEnglish our teams are extremely diverse and globally dispersed. We focus on understanding cultural and language issues and are constantly working to advance ourselves and leverage communication excellence to deliver results for our clients and win in the marketplace. A majority of GlobalEnglish employees speak English as a second language and they are power users of the GlobalEnglish solution.”
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Offering enterprise software and services to global corporations that improve workforce Business English Communication skills and global business performance, GlobalEnglish provides a solution to this international communication discrepancy. A collaboration with clients leads to obtaining what GlobalEnglish calls Enterprise Fluency™, which results in the “communication, collaboration, and operational proficiency companies must have to compete in today’s global economy”.
Providing a comprehensive on-demand software solution in 15 languages that gives instant, on-the-job support for business tasks in English and formal coursework for building lasting Business English proficiency, GlobalEnglish offers a phenomenal language learning solution.
As the world progresses on an international relations scale, Kahl has advice for companies that do business world-wide.
“The future of both the Canadian and the USA's economies are tied to how effectively our corporations are able to execute in emerging markets. The companies that are winning in these markets are attracting and retaining the best people. We all know how fierce the war for talent has become in these markets and in nearly every case, English is the "glass-ceiling" for a majority of the workforce. Being highly proficient in Business English is worth more to a college graduate than an MBA. Employees in emerging markets are struggling with English right now because the work environment is changing so rapidly. We believe that all of your employees in these markets need ongoing access to tools to help them do higher quality work in English every day and we think GlobalEnglish is the best choice for supporting this need.”
