FYG Explorer Business English Training
Dan Lamb is a business-minded L&D specialist with experience in different industry sectors and he is able to provide bespoke training for company managers as well as skills analysis and consultancy services.
He has career experience in sales, negotiation, marketing, project management, cost control, purchasing, team management, recruitment, leadership and training – and combined with his training as an adult education teacher, and his energy for people, he is the perfect choice for bespoke training to meet the needs of your organisation.
Our training for employees is specifically targeted to the needs of each individual, and Dan is fluent in Japanese and French so he is also able to offer training in these languages as alternatives to English.
Bespoke training
Dan is able to tailor training to the needs of your delegates at any level of seniority, and can design new programmes as required, whether for small, medium or large businesses, and also for international employees.
In addition to extensive cross-cultural understanding and experience working in Japan, China and France, as well as the UK, he is fluent in Japanese and French, and he is able to offer bespoke training in those languages as well as training in Business English.
Sessions can be held face-to-face or online, and are always designed to be engaging and thought-provoking, with a focus on applying skills to the workplace.
Onboarding and Induction
Based on the needs and values of each individual company, Dan is able to offer Onboarding sessions which cover behavioural frameworks, communication skills, and other core business competencies, either for individuals or in small-group sessions.
Common topics are Leadership, Teamwork and Role Management, Negotiation and Persuasion-Influencing, Project Management including planning and organisation / delegation, Resilience, and Continuous Improvement.
In addition to this, Dan is an experienced Diversity and Inclusion trainer, and also leads sessions on cross-cultural understanding.
MOT your employees’ English
For international employees, we recommend holding periodic review sessions to help with Business English. Many companies arrange language support for their employees but these lessons are not necessarily specific to the needs of the employee or geared up to making improvements to their performance in work contexts. Business English for employees needs to be training, and not just language lessons.
It is helpful to think of our review sessions like a car’s MOT or service, because English is a part of the essential equipment that employees need to do their job – and in the same way that vehicles and machinery need to have a service carried out, it is recommended that all employees’ English is re-checked periodically in order to ensure it is maintained to the best possible standard.
For French and Japanese speakers, our training sessions specifically carry out a check-up of common mistakes made by that language group, and especially for Japanese employees we consider that one of our 3-hour sessions should be essential one-off training, no matter what their language level.
Cross-cultural training
Based on the time Dan spent living in Japan, and the many years that he has worked with Japanese people in the UK, he is able to offer practical cross-cultural training in order to help employees understand how cultural differences relate to office matters and teamwork.
On the one hand this training is aimed specifically at Japanese assignees in the UK, and is best carried out as early as possible in their secondment, ideally during their onboarding process.
However, he is also able to provide cross-cultural training to English-speaking employees who work with Japanese colleagues or managers in a UK or European office, and this is particularly beneficial for company staff who may find themselves frustrated by different ways of working and instances of a different understanding of what they may feel has been communicated. While working for a Japanese company in the UK, Dan was able to act as a ‘bridge’ connecting employees and managers of these differing cultures, to avoid them becoming entrenched in their own stereotypes of each other, and he is available to work as a consultant with a remit to improve the cross-cultural dynamics of other localised Japanese offices.
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Business English philosophy
As an employee in a foreign-language environment, there should be no shame for seconded staff accepting professional direction for using English in the workplace, and when this is provided in a one-to-one environment it can be tailored to the individual – leading to more efficient use of English in different contexts, to the benefit of your company.
Our philosophy is to treat English language ability as one part of an employee’s equipment or machinery for doing their job, and the pursuit of continuous improvement should be encouraged. It is therefore important to us that employees feel reassured that they are not being seen in a bad light by undertaking Business English training.
Japanese employees are very concerned about 'losing face' in the workplace, much more so than employees of Western origin. For this reason, we have discovered that they are hesitant to accept help with their English as it might be interpreted as weakness or a sign of unsuitability for their job.
However, when an HR department takes the lead in providing Business English to Japanese employees, this takes away their fear of being looked down on by their colleagues.
No company gives an employee a position of responsibility unless they are confident in the abilities of that individual. In an international company someone might have all the right business acumen but they can still lose the company money through mistakes in English or costly misunderstandings.
Dan Lamb has more than ten years of experience training Japanese businessmen and women in both spoken and written English for the workplace, and he has developed a model of training which is firstly to assess an individual's use of English and then to carry out periodic review in order to check the employee’s English does not slip back or fall into bad habits.
The purpose of the training is not to help employees achieve better test scores, but to enable them to work more efficiently in English and without misunderstandings.
Most employees in the UK have high test scores in English tests and do not need 'English lessons' of the traditional kind – but critically they do often need to learn how to adapt their academic knowledge to the working environment they are in.
Misunderstandings cost time and money – this is less the case for beginners, but all the more important for employees who do speak English to a good level, because their listeners will assume that what they said is actually what they wanted to communicate. This is where misunderstandings are caused.
Taking any individual’s starting point, we are able to address the most important ‘bad habits’ that might cause misunderstandings, and provide contexts to show the different meaning of what the employee actually said compared to what they wanted to say. The value of this training is maximised if it is personalised according to our methods, and although other language input of any kind should be beneficial, our training sessions are particularly valuable because of the way they take an individualised approach to the English needs of Japanese and French delegates.
Common mistakes
There are a surprising amount of ways that French or Japanese people tend to use make certain mistakes in English, without realising that they have not communicated the meaning they intended. Since Dan Lamb is able to identify and explain these issues, our training sessions are able to provide something that others could not offer purely as language teachers.
Dan is able to run through a checklist of common mistakes made by French or Japanese speakers, so a one-off training session can save an employee from countless unforeseen circumstances which could be caused by communicating the wrong meaning in different situations.
The key to eradicating mistakes in language is to focus on errors which lead to a miscommunication, as opposed to overly focusing on small mistakes in which it is nevertheless clear what the speaker is intending to communicate. The main focus of all our training is therefore to ensure that all employees can avoid making significant miscommunicative mistakes in using English, and for Japanese employees, Dan is the go-to person for companies anywhere in the UK because he himself is fluent and has experience in a Japanese company working with Japanese managers and staff.
The fact that many Business English mistakes are so avoidable means that our training can pay dividends, even with only a one-off session.
The language and vocabulary differences between English and Japanese create the same problems for all Japanese speakers, in the same way as with French, which means it is a relatively simple exercise for someone in the know to check for these potential difficulties. Through regular ‘updated review’ sessions, therefore, we are able to help employees eradicate common mistakes with which they might be liable to miscommunicate their meaning, and each session also provides a safe forum where an employee can raise any matter do with English that they might feel embarrassed asking about elsewhere. In these ways a commitment to ongoing Business English training is an insurance policy against the possibility of costly potential mistakes.
Companies might not like to admit to themselves that this can happen but it has been known for people in responsibility to go ahead with important decisions even though they know for themselves that they haven’t grasped all the relevant detail in the way that a native speaker would – because they feel it would be a sign of weakness to admit it.
With non-Europeans more cultural factors are at play in many situations which arise in the workplace, and it could also be described as a ‘common mistake’ when HR departments do not address these issues with cross-cultural training, which builds on the foundational concept that everyone is on the same team.
The purpose of our cross-cultural training is to review key differences between Japanese and European cultural mindsets and then lead employees to consider the ways this will impact specifically upon their own work, results and performance.
For example, one area in which Japanese employees tend to have difficulty when they first come to the UK is feeling under pressure to pretend they have understood what was said to them in spoken English. This is partly because there is not much focus on language listening skills during the education process in Japan – and although listening skills would be expected to improve quickly once the employee has been more exposed to English in the workplace, there are cultural factors at play whereby it is important for Japanese employees to be encouraged to check they have fully understood what others think has been communicating to them.
Investing in personalised training for employees is a vital step towards getting maximum value out of them as a resource, and in all contexts our training can form a vital part of an international employee’s induction programme.
In addition, it can function as a check-up which may be applicable to any international employees at any point during their time in the UK.
Fast-track training
We are able to offer intensive training programmes and when applicable we provide English 'workshadowing' training.
This training is equally valuable for employees of any non-English language group, since by following them in their routine dealings at work we would observe any areas for potential improvement in language usage and follow up with a training session on this basis.
Sessions of workshadowing are by far the most efficient way for us to provide practical Business English training for international employees, and this is therefore the best-quality way for companies to allocate training budget towards the successful integration of any employees who are new to the UK environment.
Even a short workshadowing session enables us to see first-hand what an employee's potential needs are and then get to work on them straight away.
For Japanese employees a workshadowing session is something that could ideally be arranged during the first week of their secondment, to ensure a smooth settling-in period, but workshadowing also creates an equally valuable training opportunity for improving the in-work functioning of employees who have been working here for a longer period.
It would be normal during workshadowing for our Training Consultant to be present for certain discussions or meetings where applicable but all business matters will remain entirely confidential, including the content of all discussions or any meetings attended.
The beauty of workshadowing is that we can assess the reality of an employee's language dealings in the workplace, as opposed to asking the individual to make their own assessment of their language needs or the difficulties they have in using or understanding English - and for this reason it is a genuine means of fast-track training.
Workshadowing may also feed into matters of cross-cultural understanding and the way it relates to an employee’s business dealings: through building on what we have been able to observe through workshadowing, our training solutions will be much more practical than a merely theoretical or academic approach.