When a company pays for English training for its team, a perfectly natural question arises after a few months: What exactly has changed?
Classes are held on schedule, employees are generally satisfied, and instructors note progress. However, it’s often difficult for a manager or HR to explain what the company has gained for the money spent. Have people improved their speaking skills? Perhaps. Do they feel more confident? Probably. But whether they’ve started completing work tasks more quickly, conducting meetings on their own, or asking colleagues for help less often remains unclear.
At this point, corporate English runs the risk of becoming a nice-to-have but non-essential perk for employees. When reviewing the budget, it’s easy to question such a program, since no one has documented its benefits.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the training was a waste. More often than not, the problem lies elsewhere: before the program began, the company didn’t define what results it wanted to see or what criteria it would use to evaluate them.
Before choosing a program, instructors, and a schedule, it’s worth establishing a starting point. A general test is sometimes not enough for this.
A B1 or B2 result indicates an approximate level of language proficiency, but it doesn’t answer all the questions that are important to an employer. One person might perform well on grammar exercises but still get flustered when a client interrupts them during a call. Another employee might speak with mistakes but confidently explain a technical issue and agree on next steps.
Formally, these individuals’ test results might be similar. For a business, however, these are two completely different situations.
Therefore, before starting training, it’s helpful to assess not only the employee’s overall proficiency but also how they handle tasks typical for their role. For a sales manager, this might involve giving a product presentation and addressing objections. For a recruiter, it could be conducting an interview with a candidate. For a technical specialist, it might involve explaining a problem to a client or participating in a work meeting.
For example, you can ask a participant to give a short presentation, answer a few unexpected questions, or role-play a portion of a call with a client. It’s important to define the evaluation criteria in advance: clarity, accuracy, vocabulary, reaction speed, and the ability to keep a conversation going without constant assistance.
This snapshot provides more insight than a single mark on a chart. It reveals exactly where English is hindering work and what needs to be reassessed in a few months.
After the initial assessment, you need to agree on a goal. The phrase “improve English” isn’t suitable for this. It’s impossible to measure, so in six months, everyone will interpret the result differently.
A specific goal sounds different. For example, in six months, managers should be able to conduct standard calls with international clients on their own. Recruiters must conduct the initial interview in English without the assistance of a colleague with a higher proficiency level. Engineers must explain the project status at weekly meetings without a prepared script.
A B2 level can serve as a useful benchmark in such a system, but on its own, it does not yet constitute a business outcome.
What matters to the company is not just the score a person received, but what they are now capable of doing on their own.
This also affects team formation. Grouping all employees with roughly the same level is convenient from an administrative standpoint, but not always effective. A sales manager and a programmer may need different topics, vocabulary, and communication scenarios.
At the same time, not every position requires a B2 level. An employee who occasionally reads technical documentation may only need a more limited curriculum. A manager who conducts negotiations and discusses contract terms needs a much broader set of skills. Setting the same goal for everyone here will only create unnecessary costs.
If the group’s skill levels vary widely, some participants won’t be challenged enough, while others will constantly be trying to catch up with the rest. As a result, the company formally pays for training for everyone, but not everyone benefits equally from it.
Attendance, homework completion, and participation in class are important. They help determine whether the schedule is working, whether the format is suitable, and whether participants have lost motivation.
If half the group is constantly missing classes due to work meetings, it will be difficult to expect noticeable progress. However, in such a situation, it’s not always fair to blame the employees. Perhaps the company chose an inconvenient time, or managers aren’t excusing participants from other tasks during class hours.
The number of hours attended alone says nothing about the benefit to the company. An employee may diligently attend classes, complete all the exercises, and still never start using English at work.
Therefore, a follow-up assessment should test more than just language proficiency. It’s worth revisiting the same work situations that were evaluated at the beginning. Can a manager conduct a product demonstration without assistance from a supervisor? Can an engineer answer a client’s follow-up questions without a long pause? Can a recruiter independently conclude an interview and explain the next steps to a candidate?
For a fair comparison, the tasks and criteria must be similar. If a person initially made a short test call, it doesn’t make sense to evaluate them six months later based solely on a grammar test. Otherwise, the company will be comparing apples to oranges and end up with impressive numbers but no clear conclusion.
Even noticeable progress in class doesn’t guarantee changes on the job. People need the opportunity to apply their new skills—and sometimes support from their manager. If the department head continues to handle all international calls, the manager won’t learn to work independently just because they attend classes twice a week.
Let’s look at a simple example.
Before training began, the department head would join every call the manager had with a foreign client. The manager knew the product, but found it difficult to answer unexpected questions and explain details without a prepared script.
After a few months of training, the department head began joining only the most complex negotiations. The manager was already conducting routine presentations and follow-up discussions on their own.
For a language school, the result would be improved spoken language skills. For the company, the result looks different: the manager became more independent, and the department head gained a few extra working hours each month.
This is where we can start talking about return on investment.
The economic benefit doesn’t necessarily mean a direct increase in sales.
It can manifest in saved work time, eliminating the need for an interpreter, faster document approval, the ability to work with foreign candidates, or a reduction in communication errors.
The company can calculate how many hours managers previously spent providing language support to the team. You can compare translation costs before and after the program. In the sales department, you can track the number of meetings that managers conducted on their own. In recruiting, you can estimate the time required to work with foreign candidates.
After that, the economic benefit is compared to the total cost of the program. This includes not only tuition fees but also employee working hours, administration, testing, and additional materials.
ROI as a percentage can be calculated as follows:
ROI = (economic benefit minus program costs) ÷ program costs × 100%.
If the training cost the company 120,000 hryvnias and the estimated economic benefit was 180,000 hryvnias, the net benefit is 60,000 hryvnias. The ROI in this case is 50%.
However, such calculations should be used with caution. If sales increased after the training, this does not mean that English was the sole reason. The result could have been influenced by new advertising, price changes, a better product, or the overall market situation.
Therefore, you should only consider effects whose connection to the training can be substantiated. For example, it is much easier to estimate the value of a manager’s time—since they no longer have to participate in every call—than to prove that the entire increase in revenue from international clients was due to the language course.
Not every benefit can be precisely quantified in monetary terms. More confident communication, fewer misunderstandings with clients, employees’ willingness to participate in international projects, and broader opportunities for internal advancement also have value. It is more difficult to demonstrate this value using a single financial metric, but that does not make it unimportant.
An HR report shouldn’t be limited to the number of sessions held and the attendance rate. This data is necessary, but it only describes the program’s progress.
A useful report shows participants’ starting level, the group’s agreed-upon goals, interim progress, changes in job performance, and recommendations for the next phase.
It should make it clear not only who attended twenty sessions, but also who is already capable of performing the necessary tasks independently, who lacks practice, and for whom the chosen format isn’t working.
Such data helps in making difficult but necessary decisions. Sometimes it’s worth extending the program. Sometimes it’s necessary to change the instructor, the schedule, the group composition, or the learning objective. In some cases, it’s actually better to discontinue the training if employees aren’t using English at work and the company doesn’t see a real need for this skill.
When choosing a language school, it’s important to ask in advance exactly what data the company will receive. Will there be an initial assessment? How are groups formed? How is progress tracked? Can the program incorporate participants’ real-world work situations?
In the corporate program My English by Business Language, training begins with assessing participants’ proficiency levels. Groups are then formed based on employees’ prior knowledge and the company’s goals. Throughout the program, HR can receive updates on attendance, progress, and any challenges that require attention.
To determine whether a corporate English program is worth the investment, it’s not enough to simply ask employees if they enjoy the classes. You need to know what skills they had before the program began, what they were supposed to learn, whether they’ve started using their new skills, and how this has changed their daily work.
Only then can the company make an informed decision: to continue the training, change its format, revise the goals, or redirect the budget to other needs. This is far more useful than evaluating the program based solely on general impressions.
corporate English, English proficiency, My English by Business Language
