Running a business makes your beard go grey, but...

While teaching business courses in the last month or so, I've spent a lot of time working with employees of a local company. And, as tends to happen in full-immersion courses, many of the lessons revolved around conversations, which in turn involved students and teachers getting to know each other by talking about their jobs, the things they do every day, what they like or dislike about their work, and so on.

Funnily enough, it took a little time before I recognised one of my new students as a (formerly) young guy who I had taught in the years when I was new in Italy, at the end of the nineties. He looks as fit and healthy now as he did then (he's an enthusiastic cyclist) but is no longer a youngster and now boasts a middle-management position and a head of grey hair. The years have changed me too, but more of that later.

Our relative career progress in the last decade, and the collateral damage in terms of hair colour, got us both thinking about the merits and demerits of being an employee as compared to self-employment. For him, the security offered by his job was the most important thing, along with the fact that his job was stimulating but still left him time for his family and his beloved cycling. He'd already paid off his mortage, and was buying a flat for his children. Life was sweet, or at least would be for as long as his company remained solid. He made it sound great, but for me, after a less-than-satisfactory spell as a small cog in the large machine that is the British Council, the idea of filling a similar role fails to inspire one little bit.

No, from my point of view, organisations seem more restrictive than attractive. No doubt about it, being your own boss is infinitely better! Yes, OK, you have to work 12 hours a day, or more. And it's true that if the money's tight your own salary is the first to be cut. And yes, bank loans for the business do often have to be guaranteed with your personal assets. However, the benefits undoubtedly outweigh the disadvantages!

First of all, there's the sheer animal satisfaction of continuing to exist. Getting a year older was never more enjoyable than when I was able to count the months and note that my nascent enterprise had survived its first 12 months, then its second year, and now its third, especially considering the statistics showing that a large percentage of new enterprises are destined to fail in a similar period.

Next, and perhaps most importantly, there is the immense value and interest deriving from the self-employment learning curve. Perhaps other small business people are different from me, but my first three years running a company has involved a series of things which I didn't initially know how to do, but which I had to master quickly. There were, and are, mistakes. But also the satisfaction of making good decisions, and doing things well. Learning new skills brings new perspectives and new opportunities now at a rate which I never experienced when an employee.

In fact, after talking round the subject for a while, the conclusion which we came to was just about this: working for yourself brings a higher level of risk, and a commensurately higher level of opportunity too. "But what about the money?" is the obvious question. Good point. As a freelance teacher, money was a way I had of keeping score, of getting through long, tiring days. I'd think to myself, at least today I earned €150, or whatever the sum was, and I would feel satisfaction. It seems terrible, thinking back on it! But my wife wasn't working and we had a new baby, so perhaps it was understandable.

Now however, money in terms of my own salary, is something I hardly think about at all. It just doens't seem relevant. Not to say I don't think about money, the opposite in fact. Income, costs, taxes, salaries, and all the other numbers occupy a lot of my waking thoughts, it's just that the money has become just a way of measuring the pulse and state of health of the business, rather than being stuff I could buy things with. What's great is when sales are up, we're hiring teachers or we've got a new client, rather than that my bank account contains or doesn't contain a certain sum.

Which brings me to a nice metaphor for running a company. Think, I said to my student, if you had a couple of hundred thousand euros extra to spend, what would you buy, and why? Maybe a house? A boat? A fast car? Something with a degree of novelty, which would interest you, and make you feel good about yourself, with all probability. Like a great new Christmas present that you wouldn't get bored with. Well, in a certain sense, that's what running a business can be like: the ultimate executive toy, complicated and interesting, with buttons you can push to get new actions and reactions. And when you get bored of playing with it, it can change and do something new to entertain you, at least if you've got the energy to keep playing with it.

All that said though, unlike a boat or an executive toy, running a business can make your beard go grey!

A whole year has gone by!!

Incredible that a whole academic year has gone by since I last had nothing more important to do than post on this blog! And now, in the final two hours before I go off for my summer holidays, I finally have time.

A busy year, yes, but not a bad year. Thinking back, what have been the highlights? Well, as always in this job, it's all about the people - the students, the colleagues, and all the people I've worked with in one way or another.
There have been a whole range of classes - lots of exam classes: TOEFL, IELTS, CAE, CPE, FCE - as well as general English classes at various levels. I've met a variety of interesting people through teaching one-to-one lessons, many of whom I've come to think of as friends, as we've spent so much time together.

During the year Madrelingua has also hosted students from all over the world who have come to Bologna to study Italian. This is always an intersting part of school life, and again after a few weeks of seeing the same faces, our guests come to seem like friends too. This year we've had several Russians, lots of Americans, a sprinkling of Australians, Swiss, French, Germans, Belgians, and even a girl from Bosnia. Oh, and a very bright group of young people from Cambridge university, who made me feel very old. The Italian side of our business is still small, but the teachers have learnt a lot in a very short time, and it's great to see students leaving with a much greater command of the language than they had when they arrived.

As regards English-teaching staff, the teachers we started off with in 2005 have "matured" nicely, gaining lots of experience and becoming increasingly able and professional. I'd like to think our training efforts have paid off, but in reality it's probably more likely to be mostly the effect of time and experience. Still, whatever the cause, the longer a teacher is with us, the more valuable they become to us because of the level of trust and competence which we come to rely on.

Not to say that we're not also willing to give people at the very beginning of their careers a start. We've been very happy to meet two young teachers who had had no experience whatsoever, but who worked extremely hard and in a very professional way to do their very best, to the satisfaction of our clients and myself. Experience is vital, but the right attitude is necessary too.

So what else is new? Well, I've been having a lot of fun developing our various web-sites. For examples, there's www.imparareinglese.co.uk which I've been using partly as an experiment to put up exercises and other useful information (such as a list of schools in Bologna) for our students and for anyone out there who might be interested. The exercises get lots of visits from students in countries all over the world, but especially in Eastern-Europe and in South America, for example. There's a nice synergy, I've found, between teaching a class and noticing what their needs are, and creating and publishing material on the web. When it's up, I can use it with my students first, which also serves as a test of the material - does it actually work, are there any errors (there are always errors!). There's also my personal guide to what resources are good on the internet. You can find it here:
www.imparareinglese.co.uk/risorsi_per_studenti_di_inglese.htm.

For the technically minded, the exercises on imparareinglese.co.uk run on javascript, which looks horrible the first time you see it, but is actually very straightforward. If you're interested in creating your own web-based material, you'll find a tutorial on it here:
CALL tutorial
I prepared this material for a training session with some of our regular staff at Madrelingua school of English, but sadly there wasn't much interest.. many teachers, in my experience, seem to be rather technophobic, at least if you judge by the number of them who can't operate a DVD player!

Anyway, going back to websites, since the start of the summer, with the consequent reduced teaching load, I've been working on revamping our two main sites too.
Madrelingua Corsi di inglese a Bologna
Madrelingua Italian courses in Bologna, Italy
Both of them have grown rather large, averaging thirty or forty pages or more, so it can be quite time consuming making changes. However, I view this sort of work more as training than as drudgery, because I enjoy developing new skills, especially practical ones, which can save me time and money!

Incidentally, I notice that some of Madrelingua's competitors have raised their game when it comes to Internet marketing, although often it's the most "established" of the schools which are the most static, in the sense of being unwilling or unable to invest and innovate. There are one or two little schools which as educational institutions I wouldn't rate at all but which have attractive, innovative and cost-effective marketing strategies. Equally, there are the so-called "market-leaders", the schools which would see themselves as being at the top-of-pile, so to speak, which present a very amateurish public face through their websites. For example, when you click on a link entitled "New Courses!!", you aren't really looking to read about courses which started and finished months previously.

Oh well, their loss is our gain, I suppose. Still, my prediction for 2008 is that some of the littler, "marketing-savvy", schools will be making money, and some of the larger, "dinosaurs", will not.

Well, at this point, it's time to switch everything off, pull out all the plugs, and take myself off on holiday. See you in the new (academic) year!!

October again!

As I write, slumped in exhaustion over my kitchen table on a Sunday morning, I am at the end of my first full week of teaching, and facing the second with trepidation! What a shock to return to full-time teaching again after the lazy summer months! Though I should say that it really is exciting and interesting too.

Meeting so many new people, new classes, new course-books, new colleagues, in such a short time always makes my head spin. Students are enthusiastic, teachers aprehensive, administrative staff rushed, and everyone is stressed in their own unique way. Still, experience tells me that the second week is easier, and that soon we'll be counting the weeks to the Christmas break.

Madrelingua has been fortunate enough to attract some talented young teachers this year, young people who approach their work with professionalism, enthusiasm and a willingness to learn. We're very fortunate also that some of those we worked with last year have remained in Bologna and are with us again now. However, despite the 50 or so CVs we received, there was not a single one where the applicant could boast of a professional qualification equal to or higher than Diploma (i.e. RSA DTEFLA) level.
Where have all the professionals gone?? Is it that Italy is no longer the destination of choice for older, more qualified EFL teachers, or could it be simply that as the UK and US economies have been going well for some years people are leaving the profession after just a few years and before becoming "truly" qualified.

In the past a TEFL certificate was considered an entry level qualification, good enough to get your first job but not for much more. "Qualified" meant more, and "experienced" meant years, not months or days. I guess I must be getting old to start bemoaning the state of the world. When I was a young man, it was different!

Seriously though, and for the benefit of any passing reader who may be interested, I'll repeat a point I often make at our monthly teacher-training sessions (for details of the next one, see: Madrelingua Teachers' Pages
). And that is this: Bologna, Italy and the World are full of cheap schools with lots of students, lots of teachers, and a high turnover in both. If you're happy earning about the same as the cleaning lady (or man), then no real experience and few qualifications are required. Whatever your talents, whatever your enthusiasm, whatever you learn, you'll still be easily replacable. This is not a matter of not caring, it's simply the business model of this type of school. And in the same way that there are a few well-off people as well as lots of poorer people in the world (myself included!), so too are there a few better schools, and even some excellent ones, as well as lots about which the less said the better.

I recently employed a promising young lady (certificate, experience, presentable, nice personality) who arrived for the first 2 hour lesson of a 60 hour course with a new class of "difficult" teenagers, 5 MINUTES BEFORE THE CLASS, and KNOWING NOTHING ABOUT THEM, not even the book, the level, the class objectives, etc. I had prepared a briefing pack for her hours before, and was not best pleased that she had not bothered to come and look at it. Needless to say, I refused to let her take the class (the kids would have eaten her alive, and their parents would have eaten me alive!) and ended up teaching the class myself, with her observing and participating. After the lesson, she was apologetic, but explained that it had been a misunderstanding: at the other school where she worked, she was only expected to show up on time and to stay for the required period in the class with the client or clients. The door would be closed throughout her lesson, and nobody would enquire as to what went on within.

Hoping this WAS a genuine misunderstanding, she will have another chance, but at Madrelingua we expect professionalism, and of course are prepared to pay for it. Our hourly rate is 33% more than that of the "other school", so it's fair to expect more effort. However, the point is this: we would happily pay MUCH more for staff who REALLY know what they are doing, and have qualifications to prove it.

To illustrate this, our school is now offering courses to prepare for exams like CAE, IELTS, TOEFL, and certain university exams, but we have no applications from staff with experience with these exams, or with the level of experience which would indicate that they could be trusted to develop such courses. I'll therefore be teaching them myself, with the longer-term aim of "training up" others to do these courses, but it's far from ideal.

So,dear reader, if you are just teaching English for the experience of living abroad for a year or two, all well and good. But if you hope to stay in Bologna or in TEFL long-term, follow my advice: get yourself a couple of years of experience and then do a diploma and/or a masters. Even just signing up for the course will distinguish your CV from the other 50 or so in the same pile, and you can reasonably expect to earn at least 50% more per hour and work in an environment in which you will be respected as a professional, not just another "replacable" native speaker. Who knows, you may even find a school who will subsidise your course for you - in fact, why not come and ask me? Who knows, for the right person, I may be prepared to put my money where my mouth is!

Best wishes for the new academic year!

Summertime, and the living is easy..

My last post in May talked about the end of the academic year and the prospects for the summer, so it seems that a good place to start this post would be an update on what I've been doing since then.

May seems like such a long time ago now but, thinking back, there was all the ususal bits and pieces to finish off the year - end of course exams, certificates for students, catch-up lessons, and the like. Some classes finished earlier than others, so there wasn't a day when I could say, "I've finally finished teaching!". In fact, by early June there were people signing up for intensive courses.

At Madrelingua we tried to run as many courses as possible, even if that meant only breaking even, or even taking a small loss on a group. The rationale is that every client we teach is a potential future client too, and a source of positive word of mouth for the school. So we had lots of small-ish groups starting and stopping over a period of about 5 weeks, right up until the middle of July.

I must say I enjoyed the intensive courses - they were a nice break from the grind of teaching the long annual courses. The idea that you've got a group for only a week or so, then the prospect of them renewing if they're happy, was somehow quite liberating. I felt free to address my students' immediate needs, without worrying too much about the long term - after all, if your client has only signed up for a week or two, you don't really have responsibility for their long-term learning.

I also met some nice people - there was a young architect, a couple of vegan, animal-rights enthusiasts, one of my neighbours, who did just a week but swore that those few lessons had "unblocked" his English, and of course others, though they spring less easily to mind right now.

A more challenging experience was teaching a group of middle-school kids, four of them, as I recall. The 2.5 hour lessons seemed long when I was trying to work out what I would teach, and at first I really felt the absence of a good text book (I couldn't find anything suitable for such a short course). However, once I got going, the lessons really flew by, and I was very satisfied with what was achieved. In each lesson we did some new language, with lots of games and activities to practice and recycle it, then worked with the computers - this was a good opportunity to try out new software that the publishers reps had brought around - before finally doing some work with video. With the media group, over the 5 day course, I got through about half of the first Star Wars film, and we all enjoyed it a lot.

As the video was such a success, I tried something similar with my high-school group the week after, this time using the film "Top Gun", which brought back memories for me because it was one of the first films I ever used as a teacher when I started my career back in Turkey in 1991 (the others were: Mad Max 2 & The Return of the Living Dead). It was hard work developing material for both films from scratch, and I ended up spending a lot more time lesson-planning than I usually do, but the end result in terms of student involvement and personal satisfaction was definitely worth it. If you're interested, you can find the teaching material for both films on the school's website, here:
http://www.madrelinguabologna.com/resources.html

Once most of the intensive courses were over, I found myself with time to spend on marketing... As a teacher, it can be tempting to think that what happens in class is the be all and end all of a language school, and of course from the client's point of view it is. However, the bit before that, the whole process of designing the "offer" and communicating it to potential clients is of course just as important, if not more so. With no one to teach, it matters little how good the teachers are. With no paying clients, there is no school, and no job!

At the British Council, where I worked before starting up Madrelingua, they were kind enough to fund some of us to do an online marketing course - the course was really interesting, though much of the content seemed like just common sense at the time. For example, "marketing" involves researching what your competitors are doing, deciding who your potential customers are, designing your products/services to appeal specifically to them, etc. All seemingly straightforward and uncomplicated.

However, and it is a big however, in real life when you are starting with a blank sheet of paper and a pile of your own money, the task seems much more daunting. It's not always clear what your potential clients want (they may not know themselves) or what your competitors will do. What's more, communicating with potential clients by advertising is expensive and uncertain. One of the first business magnates apparently said something along the lines of "Half of all the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half." Very true!

Spending money on advertising is very easy! People are falling over themselves, and each other, in the effort to sell us advertising. If we bought every form of advertising we were offered we would easily spend two or three times our budget. And yet, how to choose? Posters, buses, radio, TV, newspapers, leaflets, the list is endless!

The Internet is clearly becoming ever more important in many areas of business, and language schools are no exception. All schools have websites nowadays, though they often aren't much good. Which brings me back to what I've been doing over the summer - without a doubt, the majority of my time has been spent working on Madrelingua's websites - tidying up pages, adding new content - and on trying to make the sites more visible in the search engine rankings.

If you go along to Google and type in Madrelingua, on the first page you'll get a German translation business, then our school, then lots of other stuff. That's a situation that I'm quite happy with, as it makes us easy to find if a client or potential client already knows the name of the school. However, if you type in keywords such as "corsi di inglese Bologna" or "Italian courses Bologna", you'll find that more established competitors are much more visible than us. Working out why, and what to do about it has occupied most of my summer!

If you'd like to see how the sites have changed, follow these links:

The English school - http://www.madrelinguabologna.com

The Italian courses - http://www.madrelinguaitaliano.com

We started off a year ago with one site which had about 12-15 pages, and by now we have two main sites and two other undeveloped domains totalling over 50 pages. The initial site was done by a professional web designer, and a good job he did too, but subsequently we have tried to do the work ourselves. The idea is that this way the site will be more flexible, as well as being cheaper to run.

One thing I'm particularly proud of is the photo gallery I finished recently. You can see it here:

http://www.madrelinguabologna.com/gallery3.html

It shows photos of kids who studied with us during the last academic year, and is intended to give parents an idea of what to expect from a course.

Web marketing has been fun, but now I'm looking forward to the new academic year and to the start of intensive courses. We'll be running courses for adults and for kids in September, then the usual annual courses from October. It'll also be fun to see all our colleagues again, and perhaps to meet new people too!

Well, other than ten days in France with Stefi and the kids, that's been my summer. Hope you enjoyed yours too!

End of the academic year looming..

At this time of the year, thoughts inevitably turn to the end of the "annual" courses in early June and, in the absence of an "intensive course" or two, to the long, long, summer break ahead, perhaps with little or no work until September or even October.

It's unfortunately true that the rhythym of language school activity in Italy does tend to mean working as hard as possible for eight months of the year so as to be able to scrape by for the other four. Keeping a portfoglio of private clients can help, but they also tend to dry up in the summer, at least for August when everyone goes to the beach, and often longer. Translations may bring in a little cash for those who've got the contacts, but with so many unemployed graduates around, the pay can be terrible (especially translating books - try NEVER
to work for a publishing company!!).

For single teachers who have the necessary documents to work in the UK, there are lots of summer schools around for a month or two. A job on a residential summer school for 4 or 6 weeks can solve the rent problem, and be a lot of fun too. There is of course the disadvantage that it means working, when everyone else is on holiday. Maybe for a year or two, but no great prospect in the longer term. It's also an unpalatable option for teachers with families, which can't just be abandoned to fend for themselves for months at a time.

Conclusion? EFL in Italy is not going to be a great career in the longer term unless you're lucky enough to work for a school which will a.) guarantee you work all year round, or b.) pay you in the holidays. The British Council might be one such option: last I heard they were giving out "local" (meaning "conforming to Italian law") contracts. Another option for the qualified and the lucky is a job in a university, which is nice work if you can get it. Finally, there's the possibility of going self-employed, building up your own client base (which may include work during at least some of the summer), and being your own boss. This was my own preferred option: though I remember swearing on many occasions that anyone opening a language school these days must be completely mad, the loss of my job with the closure of the British Council in Bologna in 2005 lead me to do just that!

The new business might not have solved the summer income crunch problem, but has given me no shortage of things to do. If nothing else, I can always work on improving our web presence (see http://www.madrelinguabologna.com & http://www.madrelinguaitaliano.com). Marketing has to be fitted in around teaching from October to June, but in the summer there's time to devote to understanding the mysteries of html, Google, and the rest.

Which brings me to my final comment: the best solution to the terrible working conditions in EFL might just be to quit the business and do something which pays all year round. Have a nice summer!

Welcome to my blog!

Hi!

I'm an English teacher living and working in Italy and I'm going to write on subjects which I hope will be of interest to other teachers of English: discussions on things which I'm doing in class, ideas on how students learn, how best to teach.
I'm currently working in an English school in Bologna, in the north of Italy. I teach classes of adults and children at various levels, and I also manage the teaching team and do some teacher training.
Soon I'll be posting materials and ideas for teachers and students to use.
In the meantime, why not check out my school's website? www.madrelinguabologna.com
I am also working on a site specifically for students of English: www.imparareinglese.co.uk
Comments and contributions are welcome..
Watch this space for updates!

Daniel