Crossing borders with Lan-bridge’s Customized Foreign Language Training

Voice of Lan-Bridge, 30/05/2018

By Chen Siqi (Lan-bridge’s Training Department). 

During the past five years, China has made considerable progress promoting international cooperation and opening-up under its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative. China’s opening-up to the outside world, OBOR and the growing sense of community that has emerged with the global village are three major factors in China embracing globalization. 

Going global is an inevitable trend for Chinese enterprises, which continue to increase in scope and depth, just as going to China is a trend for companies outside of China. 

As a well-known language service provider in China, Lan-bridge provides high-quality and customized language training services for companies that participate in OBOR, helping them to solve language problems and cultural differences and to protect their businesses. Our Custom Enterprise Training helps upgrade language products beyond translation needs, from the first stage of business processes, to other aspects of the products, including multi-dimensional analysis, and clarification of clear customer needs. This multi-faced one-stop service provides the best possible training results and quality for both Chinese companies looking to go global and global companies looking to come to China. 

Under the guidance and encouragement of the country’s going out strategy, the pace of the internationalization of China’s business environment has accelerated. Under the active promotion of OBOR and the establishment of the Asian Investment Bank and Silk Road Fund, the scope and depth of Chinese companies’ overseas business continues to expand. 

In spite of this, in the international arena, there is a clear gap between Chinese enterprises and the same type of enterprises in developed countries. Developed countries in Europe and America still occupy most of the high-end international markets. Most enterprises in China face low-end product ratios and low prices. 

One of the reasons for the above problems is that the overseas talent pool of Chinese enterprises is weak, and the recruitment of high-level overseas talents is not perfect. In addition to professional and business capabilities, standardized language skills, specialized language skills, and cross-cultural thinking skills are important capabilities that companies need to improve in the contexts of going global and international competition.

Conversely, when entering the Chinese market, many outside companies may also find that discovering and choosing the right Chinese staff isn’t an easy task.Fortunately, our wide network and experiences Human Resources department can help you access China’s large and growing talent pool. We can select and vet good-quality staff across multiple industries, helping your organisation with perhaps the most crucial step for doing business in China: having the right people on the ground. 

Lan-bridge has established itself in the language service industry over the past 18 years. The company’s custom language training is an independent product line. It integrates group resources from across the company and focuses on creating a tailored product for all clients. 

The first phase is training business processes, on-site research, and in-depth analysis of customer’s needs. Through our well-developed and tested program, we clarify customer needs and provide customers with high-quality and effective training services.

For corporate clients, the advantages of customized language training over standardized and modular language training are that they are closer to the actual needs of the company, more flexible and more targeted. As a result, companies receive higher level and more effective training. Lan-bridge differs from general foreign language training institutions and college training centers in that it spends a lot of manpower and intelligence to focus on the “three cycles” before its training program begins.

(1) Field research, in-depth analysis of customer’s views and ‘pain points’ 

Our philosophy is that training does not take a one-size-fits-all shape. Only by clarifying the true needs of customers can we solve their language problems. From the beginning of our contact with the company, we conduct research on the reality of their market and customers. This process covers a range of angles. 

First of all, through online research and in-depth communication with the relevant departments, we research basic information such as the nature of the business, its type, size, location, and what languages are involved.
 
Secondly, we approach the employees who will participate in training and collect specific language requirements, trainees’ situation (age, type of work, education level, etc.) through focus groups, interviews, etc., and analyze the pain points of enterprises and trainees in conjunction with the company’s overseas business processes, work scope, and content. 

Finally, in order to enable enterprises to accurately understand the results of the analysis, we will provide a range of scenarios and make concrete examples. For example, “Employees need to interact with local subcontractors and governments in project X. Key areas include: business written language standardization; contract documents; accuracy of wording; communication using local accents, etc.” Analysing these points ensures that customers can accurately understand and visualize the relevant pain points, and at the same time, we help them further understand the market and customers they are working with.
 
(2) Targeted, customized training program

After comprehensive and in-depth understanding of customer language pain points and analysis of customer needs, we will customize the training program for our customers in terms of training content, methods, and cycles. In terms of training content and cycles, we aim to balance the characteristics of long-term, continuous, and accumulating language learning with the company’s cost-effectiveness and output ratio requirements. 

The course content ranges from basic and business-end courses to industrial language courses. At every level, flexibly a customer-specific content according to the level of students is emphasied. The training methods are diversified, combing online and offline customized according to the company’s working hours, types of employees, and absorptive capacity. The offline training includes offline discussion groups and offline activities. The online training mainly uses Lan-bridge’s network school platform. 

At the same time, our training also includes on-site training for overseas projects; we arrange for the deployment of personnel to participate in field research in advance, develop training programs based on the work content, time, and characteristics of the overseas project sites, and match outstanding outside and local teachers to the project site. In addition, we provide customers with a variety of training solutions, grade training, “flip classrooms”, and field scenario teaching for customers. In order to help customers find the most suitable training program, we always accept their choices and input during the process.

(3) Check-in on students’ progress

Before and during the training, our staff work hard to understand and track the true level of the students. Through tests, discussions, and monitoring, they can follow and evaluate the progress of the students. This is an important part of clarifying the needs of customers. Before the training, through the centralized online or offline level test, multilingual test questions according to our specifications are adopted, and the language level of the trainees is tested according to the training priorities, including but not limited to listening, speaking, reading, translation and other ability tests.

Some enterprises have their training participants are distributed around the globe. We provide various forms of horizontal testing programs, including network testing and telephone testing, to truly understand the actual level of students in order to prepare appropriate training material and curriculums. 

Before the start of the training course, we provided trial courses for participants to ensure the quality of teaching and match the training teachers who are most suitable for the learner’s learning style and way of thinking.

(4) “Four aspects”

Lan-bridge Customized Foreign Language Training products cover the “four aspects” to maximize matching of customer needs, including teachers, teaching materials, teaching, and professors. Our teachers include industry and linguistic experts who often have similar knowledge but a unique perspective of the industry. During the selection of teachers, we use the concept of “Teaming Teachers” to customize and match a teacher team in the entire course system. In the graded and phased courses, we use the most suitable teachers for training elements and student situations, and in addition to teaching teachers, we also arrange for teaching assistants and teaching staff to provide housekeeping services for customers and trainees. 

During the training process, students are asked questions, morale is encouraged, and training is not allowed to become too formalized. In the use of textbooks, we are not limited to existing textbooks on the market. We use more up-to-date materials related to the curriculum and use many visual materials, including various learning video materials. In addition, we also custom-edited textbooks for specific courses, and used the translation materials of our independent intellectual property rights as reference for the compilation of teaching materials to meet training needs. 

As our teaching is aimed at adults learning foreign languages, we generally use short-term high-frequency and fragmented learning as the main teaching concepts. We adopt interesting and lively teaching methods such as flipping classrooms, activity learning, and moving classrooms to break up teacher’s lectures and optimise students focus. In terms of professors, the teacher-student role is replaced. The teacher acts more as a “mentor” and guides and gives feedback the students, emphasizing positive interaction and enthusiasm for learner to learn independently.

As the old adage has it, “if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.” Companies that are going global need more than just a translation service. They also need a key to fundamentally solving language barriers and cultural differences. Through customized language training, employees achieve a significant improvement in their language skills and cross-cultural competence. For companies, this kind of training is a continuous and cost-effective investment.