The term Industrie 4.0 was coined in 2011 in an article in VDI Nachrichten co-authored by Henning Kagermann, the former CEO of Germany’s most successful IT company, SAP. The article described the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is now fully underway: the merging of man, machine and artificial intelligence in the world of work.
Business English training providers typically lag behind their corporate clients as they try to understand and satisfy their changing demands. Since the financial crisis of 2007–08, these training demands have increasingly revolved around the simplification of administrative processes by outsourcing to a dedicated external provider, the continuous rigorous reviewing of training spend and increased flexibility on the part of the trainer.
But a parallel revolution resulting in a “Business English Trainer 4.0” still has to take place.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, blended learning has finally come of age. Company employees can now access digital language learning content and language instructors who work virtually. Tools such as vocabulary trainers, instant translation services, and video and voice recording apps can be easily incorporated at low cost. So, beyond offering virtual support as part of a digital learning concept, is there a future role for in-company business English trainers? And if so, what could it look like?
Reskilling and upskilling
Corporate learning and development (L&D) professionals are currently focusing on reskilling and upskilling their global workforce. Numerous reports in recent years — by the World Economic Forum (WEF), LinkedIn and others — have identified critical thinking, creativity and collaboration as being among the top ten essential employability skills in 2025 or earlier. These are three of the “Four Cs” that were identified more than 20 years ago as key 21st-century skills.
As employees learn to apply these skills within the technologically changing world of work, they clearly need to apply the fourth “C”, their communication skills — including their English language skills — as effectively as possible.
Business English trainers, as language and communication experts, understandably see themselves as contributing to the development of such soft skills within L&D activities. The nature of most trainers’ backgrounds, personal interests and experience has led them to focus primarily on the linguistic element of communication training and less on the behavioural aspects. Developing intercultural competence and business communication skills — delivering a presentation, writing emails and participating in meetings — has, over the years, become an expected part of the training mix but has not necessarily been remunerated appropriately by L&D clients.
The times, they are clearly a-changing. When I started working as an in-company trainer in Germany in 1987, Proctor & Gamble had just purchased the well-known German toothpaste manufacturer Blendax, a family-owned company simply bursting to grow. Two years later, the Berlin Wall fell and globalization took off. There was a substantial need for people to upskill their school English for business purposes, and for people in Central Europe to reskill from Russian to English.
English as a must-have
Whether or not we think this process is generally complete, being able to communicate in English at work in industrialized European countries is now considered a must-have, just like being able to use Word or PowerPoint. And it is understandable that L&D decision-makers wish to keep their spend on English skills low by purchasing a simple, time- saving digital option, allowing them to use their budgets on more pressing areas.
This does not mean that English is now spoken perfectly across national workforces, but it does mean that most employees now have good enough English to work out strategies for themselves for avoiding major miscommunications with their international business partners — and for achieving what they intend. Business English trainers are therefore faced with an existential question: where does their future lie?
Problem-solving, critical thinking and analysis, creativity, originality and initiative all demand communicative dexterity. Today’s international business players need to persuade, argue the case, defend, counterargue, reinforce and promote all those issues that they have solved, analytically reviewed, used as a basis for new original ideas and put forward without anyone’s begging.
They do this in their lingua franca, English. How successfully they achieve this has more to do with their persuasive skills and charisma, the clarity of their expressed thought, their use of voice and physical expression (with the appropriate attitude and respect for their counterpart) than with their competence in English.
Ten years ago, the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, published “Future Work Skills 2020”, which accurately predicted the skills that were identified by the World Economic Forum in last year’s report. Without knowing the implications of an impending global pandemic, the Institute for the Future specified intercultural competency and virtual collaboration as key skills for 2020. It wrote: “Successful employees within … diverse teams need to be able to identify and communicate points of connection (shared goals, priorities, values) that transcend their differences and enable them to build relationships and to work together effectively.”
This, in itself, requires social intelligence. In other words, employees who can “adapt their words, tone and gestures accordingly”. Surely, that should be the goal of any 21st-century business English trainer working in today’s digital and hybrid environment.
From language to communication
Business English trainers therefore do not need to reskill, but to upskill. As face-to-face and online language trainers, they already possess a solid foundation of communication skills that they can build on. Their intercultural experience and often intuitive understanding of emotional intelligence has already afforded them insights into appropriate communicative behaviour. This intuition may require more formal training in practice so that trainers can grasp experiential training approaches and integrate these concepts with more confidence into their own training. Combining this with their own experience of working in an international environment, they can still define and play a role in this reworked world as a trainer/facilitator/coach of communication skills for people working internationally.
This learning development will not be tied to learners’ Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) levels, but to the interpersonal communicative demands of their jobs, to the appropriate behaviour required by their changing work contexts and to the people involved. Language will not be the focus of skills development. It will be one element that could come into focus if the learner’s communicative effectiveness demands it. But the learning and training of interpersonal business communication skills will demand a much more holistic approach than is currently the case. Actually, it demands it already.
Getting the job done
Henning Kagermann revisited his original article about Industry 4.0 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in March 2021 and mapped an extension of technological industrial innovation up to 2030. “We have to share our knowledge, our experience and our best practices much more internationally in future,” he wrote. In the pre-pandemic age, business English trainers may well have used this international aspect as an argument to justify their existence. But the freelance in-company business English trainer of former years is in the process of disappearing, particularly in mature markets.
As we get to grips with the pandemic and business life moves on, employees’ needs and learning demands are changing substantially. Virtual teamwork, hybrid forms of communication, widespread use of communication platforms such as Slack, the increasing importance of video messages, agile forms of leadership and project participation are all formats that place increasing demands on our interpersonal abilities — even though their aim is often to make life easier.
Of course, we do this in English, but increasingly, language is not the issue. It’s all the other things we do or don’t do, or don’t even think about while using the language. And this is where our learners need support, to help them with their ultimate goal of getting the job done. So, will “Business English Trainer 4.0” be what is needed? I think not. More likely, it will be “Business Communication Trainer 4.0”.