Corporate students have their company logo in the top right corner of the student profile.
Click on the logo to see comprehensive information about their company's English requirements and how to best teach the student.
Know their requirements
Corporate students have their lessons paid for them by their companies. Each company will have a slightly different set up and different needs for their staff. If you click on the company name, you will see all of this outlined. Please make yourself familiar with this information before teaching a corporate student. They should not have to explain any of this to you. If you teach a first lesson, the student should make you aware that they are taking lessons through their company. You should then enter that information under the "Needs" section of their profile. They will automatically be flagged as a corporate student when you save their profile.
We have to balance the needs and interests of the students with the satisfaction of the company. The bottom line is that if your student is satisfied with your classes, and making progress in whatever measure their company uses, then all is good.
We also provide textbooks to corporate students. They are delivered before the start of their course.
IMPORTANT We sign an NDA with our corporate clients, saying that we will not disclose their company name and other information. This applies to teachers as well. Please take this seriously.
Stay on target
With corporate students, they are often accountable to their HR departments for their degree of progress (and sometimes have to pay for their own classes if they do not improve). Consequently, we are also accountable to a degree for how much they improve. We therefore have to crack the whip a bit and make sure that they are on point with lessons and making progress in their books.
This is not always possible, so when you complete your lesson records, make sure you are honest about the effort they make in the lesson (students never see this) and whether or not they studied and did the homework. We can use this information later when reporting back to their HR people (ex. "Yes, he did not do so well, but in six months he has only covered ten pages in the book, and makes very little effort in class. He also never does homework").
Conversely, we can then analyse what successful students are doing and make recommendations on the strength of the data we collect.
Essentially, we must ensure that they are learning functional business English. Being able to shoot the breeze at the water cooler is not enough. If you get push back from a corporate student, remind them of how much their day to day office communciation is "daily conversation" and how much of it is making requests, responding to feedback, discussion, negotiation, presentation and so on. You can mix conversation and book quite successfully.
Assessments and Progress Reports
Every corporate student must do an assessment at the beginning and end of the course. If you are doing a trial, then you will need to do an assessment anyway. At the end of the course, you will be asked to complete a progress report for students that you were the main teacher for. This is paid and does not take long at all.
Testing
We do not do any testing, but must be aware of the tests that are used for the assessment of the students by their companies. Typically, this is TOEIC, but for our corporate students it is often a test called GBC (previously FSI). This test is tough, not well-known and it is hard to game the test. See the following help page about the GBC test for more information.
Real usernames
Corporate students must sign up with (some identifiable version of) their (full) real names so that we can identify them and report back to their training/HR people. If your student has signed up with a first name only, or some strange nickname (like "Igaman95"), then you should change their username for them. Names like "firstname_lastname" or "firstname.lastname" etc are acceptable and do not need to be changed.
If you have to change a student's username, do this for them during class. Tell them why you are changing their username, and explain that they will need to use the new username to log in.
You can change a user's name by clicking "Edit" on their userpage.