Saturday 3 March 2012

Improve Your English In The Workplace

If English is not your first language and you want to improve your grasp of it in order to get on in your career or make new friends, sometimes your place of work is the best situation to do this in. If you need to work to earn a living you won’t necessarily have the time to fit an English course around it, particularly if your hours are long or you work shifts, so combining your learning with your job can be the ideal solution.



One of the biggest helps to you at work if you are trying to increase your vocabulary is to talk as much as possible to your English-speaking colleagues. If you are not able to talk much during working hours, either because you are in a loud environment such as a factory or because you are too busy, then spend as much time as you can talking during breaks and lunchtime, or before work begins. Make friends with people who are feel comfortable correcting your English and giving you pointers on where you are going wrong.

If you are in an office job, then you should get into the habit of trying to communicate by email as much as possible too as this will help with your writing skills. Just make sure, once you have written an email, you go back through it with a spell and grammar checker before sending it! Communicating through email is an essential part of many jobs, so if you want to improve your career prospects you need to master this. Why not have a vocabulary list on your desktop and add to it every time you learn a new word or phrase? Try to read as much as much work-related material as possible too, even if it’s something as simple as the office notice board.

If you work with a lot of non-English speaking people you might also want to consider trying to talk to your employers about the benefits of learning English online. There are many online courses out there today which will offer work-based language training geared specifically towards business English with discounts for large groups of people, so they might well be happy to invest in their employees’ development.

Learning English online is better for those who have to combine their studies with a job because the syllabus can be completed at any time, as long as there are computers available, and can be tailored to meet the skill level of each individual employee as obviously not everybody will be at the same level. For your employers, many courses will have the benefit of allowing them to view reports on your progress and see where your own personal strengths lie. This can of course ultimately have an effect on your career development so taking such a course can be a very important step forward.

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