Companies constantly seek methods to optimize workforce productivity and effectiveness. A powerful approach to achieving this goal is through strategic workforce planning bolstered by English language testing. This tactic not only identifies and addresses skills gaps but also reduces attrition and strengthens your workforce for both short-term and long-term success.
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A workforce is only as effective and productive as its skills. Given that these skills are continuously evolving, proactive strategic planning is essential to future-proof your business. Effective workforce planning aligns your organizational strategy with your hiring strategy, providing a safeguard against future skills shortages.
Strategic workforce planning offers numerous benefits:
By incorporating data-led English language testing into your skills gap analysis, you unlock additional advantages, such as reduced attrition rates. Confident communication is the bedrock of business success and enhances every core workplace power skill. For international businesses, effective communication hinges on English proficiency. Assessing your team¡¯s English language skills allows you to evaluate other business competencies as well.
Here¡¯s how to incorporate English language assessment at each stage of the employee lifecycle to reinforce your workforce planning.
English is the global language of business and technology, making it a critical skill to evaluate during the recruitment process. The first step is to test each candidate¡¯s English proficiency during the interview stage. Using an AI-based language assessment tool such as?Versant by ÃÛÌÒapp allows you to efficiently filter out candidates who do not meet the required proficiency level. This provides a reliable set of metrics to inform your broader workforce planning.
When hiring at scale, this approach accelerates the process and offers an unbiased, accurate picture of current language skill levels.
Once employees are onboard, ensure they can continually develop their English language skills. Workplace-relevant English language learning helps employees feel they are making regular progress, boosting their confidence and loyalty to the organization. Ongoing English language development is particularly beneficial for businesses looking to expand into international markets.
If you're investing in English language learning, it¡¯s crucial to measure its effectiveness. Regularly assess employees' English skills to monitor their progress. Integrate these assessments into your strategic workforce planning to identify potential future skills gaps before they arise.
Incorporating language assessment into employee appraisals supports their development, enhances job satisfaction, and builds their confidence to pursue further skills and promotions.
English language proficiency serves as an effective benchmark for strengthening workforce planning, mitigating against future skills gaps, and improving employee retention. Here¡¯s how.
Strengthen your business¡¯s workforce planning with ÃÛÌÒapp Language Solutions for Work. Tools such as?Versant by ÃÛÌÒapp offer flexible, fast and accurate language testing and certification at scale. Additionally, develop employees¡¯ workplace-relevant language skills with Mondly by ÃÛÌÒapp.
Incorporating English language testing into your strategic workforce planning ensures that you¡¯re building a resilient, adaptable, and highly skilled workforce ready to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.
Are you ready to elevate your workforce planning? Learn more about how ÃÛÌÒapp Language Solutions for Work can help you identify skills gaps and develop your team¡¯s English proficiency for sustained success.
Read our blog post 'Boost the quality of your hires with English proficiency testing'.
It's incredible to know that there are thousands of languages spoken across the world, each with its unique set of challenges for learners. A question that often pops up is: "Which language is the hardest to learn?". Today we take a closer look at this question and consider different factors that make learning a language challenging.
Preparing students for the modern world of work can be challenging; it's constantly adapting and changing which can be hard to keep track of. Today's post is a Q&A on the teaching of employability skills and the essential skills and qualities students need to thrive in the 21st century. offers insights to answer common questions and help you improve your language teaching skills.
My advice is to push the issue back to the students by putting them in groups and asking each group to identify a different job/career that involves people working with others. Then ask "What would happen if this job was competitive?instead of collaborative?" You may have to re-explain the concepts, but let students write a little story about a situation in which the workers suddenly all turn competitive.
For example, It was chaos in the women's soccer/football game. All the members of the blue team suddenly became competitive. Each one still wanted to win, but each decided that she would shoot a ball into the other team's net. This included the goalie, who ran up to the front of the field and purposely shoved and tripped members of her team ¡.
Or for more traditional jobs, In the middle of the operation the nurse pushed the doctor out of the way and picked up the instrument. The patient also wasn¡¯t completely asleep, and he tried to do the operation himself, then ¡
It's all absurd, of course, but it can lead into other tasks asking students why collaboration is so important in each job. Then, turning it back to language, what kinds of language does each profession require to collaborate? For soccer/football players, this includes shouted requests and commands:?Pass the ball to me! Shoot!?as well as hand and body gestures. Similarly, doctors require professional jargon:?Pass me the scalpel, please.?Rather than?Give me the pointy knife thing!
One hundred years ago, in 1923, Thomas Edison predicted that motion pictures would replace teachers and books. Since then, similar predictions have been made for radio, TV and computers. It hasn't happened, and one of the reasons is that we crave the human touch in our teaching and learning. I recently read. "When it comes to getting knowledge to stick, there may be no substitute for human relationships. ¡ I've been to former students' weddings and baby showers and funerals of their parents," says Millard, the high school English teacher in Michigan. "I've hugged my students. I've high-fived my students. I've cried with my students. A computer will never do that. Ever, ever.¡±(Waxman, 2023, para. 21-22)
But, that doesn¡¯t mean teachers should stop learning about new technologies. We need to keep finding ways for them to help us and our language learners in the classroom. It can seem overwhelming, though, which is why I recommend shifting responsibility to students: ¡°Do any of you know about ChatGPT? Yes? How do you think you could use it to help you learn?¡± ??? ?
Although the world is in many ways competitive, there are countless examples of how students will do better by collaborating. Most of our students today won't be working in environments where they are competing against their co-workers. Instead, they'll be in teams and need critical thinking and negotiation skills to help them do so.
One way forward is to ensure that your classroom features more collaborative activities. Get students working in pairs and groups on all their assignments, but also create a buddy system so students always have someone else to ask for help. For example, if they're having to read a text and come across difficulties, it's often easier for them to text or call a friend than to wait until the next class. After a few collaborative activities, discuss collaboration versus competition with students and ask them which they prefer. Also, ask them for examples of what their friends and family members do regarding collaborating and competing.
As always, it's better to lead students to understand a new idea than to tell them.
If you want to learn more, make sure to check out Ken's webinar here. If you'd like to learn more about teaching future skills to students check out?21st-century skills and the English language classroom.
Ehsan Gorji is an Iranian teacher, teacher trainer and teacher educator. He also designs strategic plans, devises study syllabuses, runs quality-check observations, and develops materials and tests for different language institutes and schools in the country. Ehsan has been a GSE Thought Leader and Expert Rater since 2016.?
Reflective teaching, despite it sounding modern and sophisticated, has not yet become a common practice among English language teachers. However, the experiential??proposed by??offers a practical approach for teachers. The cycle involves teaching a lesson, reflecting on "what we did" and "how we did them," and then using that reflection to improve future English classes. By using this approach, teachers can prepare for better teaching in the long term.
