Five Key Elements To Improve Your Job Performance By Advancing your English Communication Skills

As a business professional, you might feel that you spend way too much time trying to improve your English, but you still in trouble when having conversations with your business partners. You might even need to hire an interpreter for business negotiations, or you feel that your presentations are not effective enough. You have tried to improve and watched countless videos, studied grammar books and even spent money on courses promising better English in a short amount of time. However, you are still not at the level you want to be at in your career. You might think that: you have not spent enough time reading books or watching videos. You have not found the right resources to help you improve your English. You have not got chances to practice with native speakers.

The truth is that if you keep doing what you do and you have not followed a systematic approach, you are going to burn out before you ever reach the level of English proficiency you wanted.

Instead of continuing to learn everything, you need to follow an interactive communication approach that is specifically designed for business professionals like yourself.

Let me use an analogy to help you understand.

Let us say you want to prepare for a Marathon running race. Instead of following a training programme specialised for Marathon preparation, you decide to go to the gym and run twenty minutes on every occasion on a treadmill as part of your gym training. You know what is going to happen next. You can go to the gym every day. You will be more energetic, and your stamina will grow, but, you will never be able to run the Marathon because you are not focused on solving the problem, as you are not following a specialised training programme, which prepares you for running long distances.

It seems very straightforward, but this is exactly what has happened to your English learning journey. You have tried to learn everything, but it did not help. What you only have to do is to focus on is learning that you need to advance your communication skills in English through the interactive communication approach.

To improve your job performance and secure job opportunities through advanced English, you need to follow these five steps:

1)    Build your Business English vocabulary in context and revise the most important grammar points, needed in business situations

You need to develop your business vocabulary to talk about new contents, basically about everything that you want to. It is vital that you practice the new words and phrases in context because, without it, the new words will just come and go. Contexts help you remember and transfer new vocabulary items into your long-term memory because they provide little hooks that you can fasten the new words to. Without those hooks, the chances are big that the words will just float in your short-term memory as long as they fade away as they have nothing to stick to, and which would help them to be transferred into your long-term memory.

Grammar is also essential, but not as important as vocabulary. Still, if you want to express your thoughts accurately, you need to pay attention to the details. If you want to get a good impression of yourself, you also need grammar. By the way, can you spot the error in one of the following sentences? (If yes, write the number of the correct sentence into the comments section below.) 1)I will hire you full-time when your degree will be complete. 2)I will hire you full-time you when your degree is complete. Some grammar points are more frequently used in business situations than others, so it is worth focusing on those and practising them. Never focus solely on definitions as practical grammar is the key.

All in all, vocabulary and grammar are the basic to any language.

HOW can YOU achieve it?

The best thing to do is to practice the topics you need in your business. It is needless to say that reading cookbooks and pick up vocabulary from there will not help much in your next presentation even if your vocabulary extends and you can talk about how to make a chocolate cake. I am not saying that knowing the vocabulary of the ingredients cannot be important. Still, if you want to improve your English in your field of business, you do not need to know the chocolate cake recipe.

We are lucky, because there is much help can be found online. For example, the BBC has plenty of Business English materials.

2)    Speaking Practice - participate in different, life-like business situations (role play)

Speaking has a significant role in the communication process. For every single oral communication act needs at least one speaker and one listener, therefore speaking and listening are interconnected. Sometimes you are a speaker and sometimes you are a listener. One thing should be kept in mind; namely, speaking skills can be improved and practised only through speaking activities. If you read books, learn non-business related vocabulary and listen to whatever videos and CD-s they and will not help you get better at your business communication. You need to interact with people, and you need to hear yourself (pronunciation) and get used to your voice; you need to experience if you can express your thoughts impromptu logically and relevantly. It would help if you also experienced the immediate effect on your communication partner, namely on the listener. It is also essential to practice speaking by incorporating new words and expressions and of course, acting out different role-playing situations. This practice will give you much flexibility whatever topic is discussed later in your private and your professional life.

The presence of stress should also be taken into consideration as speaking in public is a quite stressful even in your mother tongue. The stress is double when you speak in a foreign language and you are not 100% sure of how to express yourself, but as you know practice makes the master and it can help can reduce your stress level enormously. 

What can You do?

Speaking can be mastered only through speaking. The problem is that you cannot always find a partner you could discuss things with to keep up your English level. Of course, there are a few techniques, which can help even when you are alone, for example, if you stand in front of the mirror and you talk to your own reflection or you can make videos of yourself as you talk. In both cases at least you have an audience (yourself). You can also join a language course, but the problem is that they are following their own curriculum and are not focusing on your needs.

3)    Improve your listening skills through listening real (recorded) negotiations and presentations

Listening is one of the main language skills, which is necessary for oral communication, but it needs to be refined even if you are already at an advanced level. The listener is one of the participants of the communication process, and obviously, the speaker is the other one, but these roles keep changing. In order to be an effective communicator, you need to be an effective speaker as well as an effective listener. Active listening skills help you to be able to participate in business meetings and able to reply to any questions at the end of your presentation. This means that you do not only hear the questions but comprehend them, and this enables you to answer them. To improve your listening skills at an advanced level, you need to expose yourself to a lot of focused listening tasks. This means that you should sit down and focus on what you are listening to. You cannot await any improvement in your listening skills if you listen to the radio while doing the washing up or cooking for the family.

HOW can YOU achieve it?

If you are preparing for a presentation, listen to business presentations and business negotiations online or on coursebook CD-s. Listen and try to understand. Take notes and try to think about questions you could ask from the presenter. Find presentations and business negotiations, which are focusing on your industry. If you don`t understand some words and phrases you can look up the meaning of these in order that you could understand them next time.

Here is one short presentation, for example, for professionals in the fashion industry:

4)    Prepare for your own business negotiations and presentations (Adjustments)

Sooner or later, the time will come, and you need to prepare for your real negotiations or presentations. Some people think it is easy, you just need to copy and paste some texts and read them during the business negotiations and presentations and that is it. Those people who think that it works like that are wrong. Preparing for both occasions requires much thorough preparation. Besides, you do not only have to talk but convince and sell or buy and at the same time, you have to keep in mind your interest and be patient and polite. You also need to use your logic, and empathy and use your listening skills and reply by applying phrases for arguments and counter-arguments in English at the same time. When you are negotiating and presenting, you do not have time to think about the language; everything should come automatically; therefore, you need to be ready. So prepare your presentations, think about the ways you want to express yourself and what to put on your slides. You need to be aware of how to organize the text on your slides, how much text should be enough and which colours are the most convincing ones. Think ahead of questions that could be asked from you and prepare for those as well. Think about what you want to talk about and practice, practice, practice. The speaking and listening practice activities mentioned before will help you enormously, but you need to know more. It would help if you learned how the human mind works during listening to a presentation and during business negotiations. Besides the facts mentioned earlier you need to know how to use and not to use your body language to be more effective as your body language tells more about you than you think.

5) Give your own presentation and/or negotiate in real-life situations (simulations)

When you are ready with the preparation for your presentation or have prepared for your next business negotiation, it is a good idea to rehearse them both. Why? Because practice can give you self-confidence. You do not need to memorize texts, but you need to know what you are going to talk about and HOW.

As it was mentioned before, rehearsing is super important. If you do not have a partner to assist you, do it by yourself in front of the mirror or in front of your telephone or laptop camera. You can even record yourself and see if you are happy with what you see in the recording. It is highly recommended that you are also preparing for your business partner`s role and imagine their reactions or the questions they can ask from you. You can write your partner`s potential questions in advance on slips of paper and pick them one by one at the end of your talk. Try to simulate what might happen in real life or even in an online presentation or negotiation.

I help my clients following the exact approach.

I need to talk to you to give you a unique, tailored to your needs advice. For example, if you do not need to prepare for a presentation or a business meeting right now, but you want to improve your job interview skills, we will replace one pillar with the job interview preparations.

Send me a message so we can achieve your goals together!