Job Discussion Forums

[spiral78]

The economy's slumping, and at 'our' university, it shows in both our faculty courses (core business, all requesting price cuts) and outside contracts (far more lucrative than the faculty courses - normally).

We've just found that 'languages' aren't seen as a primary need in weak economies - it's evidently somewhere in the 70th percentile of the perceived needs of institutions and corporations these days.

Hence, we are considering rebranding.
Something trendy like 'Professional Communication Skills Centre.'

Actually, that even expresses more accurately what we do, since we rarely teach language as a primary focus in my teaching context

I'd be curious whether teachers and directors in other regions see an opportunity to rebrand, and if you think it might be a useful tactic to help increase business in the current economic situation. Or, has anyone already done so?

It's obviously not applicable to those teaching kids in schools - but what about the many of you who work primarily with adult learners, in any context?

[Justin Trullinger]

Nice idea.

In our context, it's becoming an issue. The organisation I work for is an independent Ecuadorian non-profit, and the primary activities in our English center have been, for a while, teacher training, placement and support of foreign teachers in local schools, and teaching English for the general public. We'd also previously done some interesting work in ESP for a variety of government ministries and English compliance testing for aviation.

We have been hurt by the economic crunch, but the hurt isn't "across the board." It's been pretty specifically affecting our English teaching programs, with teacher training and teacher placement seeming, so far, like a more static need.

I'm not sure "rebranding" is exactly the word for what we're doing right now. Probably more like "restructuring." Though it hurts, we're pretty much unable to adjust our margins to compete with the high volume English training programs that are emerging in Ecuador. (It especially hurts, because one of the ways most of those programs maintain their margins is by underpaying underqualified teachers, and pretending that it doesn't affect quality.)

So we're finding ourselves focusing on other activities. Training teachers who often won't be working for us eventually, providing inservice training for schools and universities, and designing and supervising programs in other institutions.

The name is the same, but the activities we can viably do are changing.


Hang in there,
Justin

[spiral78]

(It especially hurts, because one of the ways most of those programs maintain their margins is by underpaying underqualified teachers, and pretending that it doesn't affect quality.)

This is a problem here as well - our Centre's being compared to other providers in the region - who provide cheaper services, apparently. Unfortunately, the comparison focuses on surface issues like teacher remuneration and course costs, but doesn't delve into who the teachers are at these centres (far less qualified than we are, overall) and further, doesn't evaluate the RESULTS of the cheaper courses.

We had one client who threatened to send his students to a rival uni - until he found out that their 'comparable but cheaper' program has never yet produced even ONE student able to enter a regular course of university study (the goal) after two years. We have an 80% success rate on the same program...

But it seems that our management and the 'clients' see nothing but the bottom line.

Shooting themselves in the foot, but doing some very serious collateral damage to us in the process.