At YAPPI, we’ve been teaching English to companies for 19 years. One of our key insights? Corporate training isn’t just about language skills. It’s also about team cohesion, setting new shared goals, exchanging experiences, humor, and inside memes. Training becomes part of the corporate culture that unites. And if it’s well-organized, it also becomes a powerful tool for employee and company growth.
✓ Digital ecosystem for HR and employees
Today, a learning platform is a must-have for every provider. A standard LMS system includes data on student attendance and progress, schedules, and links to online lessons or in-person class timetables.
When a provider develops its platform into a full-fledged ecosystem, it significantly simplifies your training organization. In this case, as a client, you can access:
✓ Effective foreign language learning methodologies
The quality of material retention and, accordingly, learning effectiveness depend on the methodologies used to design the course. Key modern approaches — such as spaced repetition and the flipped classroom — are based on the research and experiments of H. Ebbinghaus (who developed the forgetting curve and explained how the brain best retains information) and B. Carey’s theory of disuse (which states that knowledge fades without practice).
Integrating these methodologies into the course:
Regular interim tests and student progress monitoring demonstrate employee progress in real time without requiring additional oversight from HR or management.
✓ Working toward a specific result
When discussing our approach, we don’t sell English by the lesson — we work to achieve a specific result per course (i.e., mastering one level of English).
On our end, we guarantee seamless operation and ongoing advancement of the learning platform, continuously refine teaching methodologies, enhance material relevance and practical value, invest in educational technology integration, and support professional development for both instructors and our entire team. Yet these efforts represent only 40% of what makes a training initiative successful.
The rest depends on the student, specifically:
Some companies come to YAPPI after unsatisfactory experiences with other providers. They share their failed cases and pain points, which we analyze to find solutions to common problems. For example:
The result? Employees waste time, HR and leadership lose credibility, and the company wastes its budget (doubly so if switching providers and restarting).
From HR experience, employees drop out due to:
Why does a carefully chosen provider fail to deliver effective, engaging training? After analyzing mistakes (ours and others’) and studying client challenges, we’ve concluded:
✓ Prioritize quality over stated price
Focusing 100% on price and 0% on quality risks getting a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Tender bids should be proportional.
Quality/Price ratio:
Imagine wanting to replace a teacher mid-semester and being told it’s impossible. Or the teacher gets sick/quits, and students must wait months due to lack of substitutes. Or requesting program adjustments to retain employees, only to hear, “Stick with it till the semester ends.”
A case in point: A large pharmaceutical company signed with YAPPI after a failed semester with a cheaper, “reputable” provider. When their needs went unmet, employees refused to continue, wasting 4-5 months of potential English monetization.
If your goal is to profit from employees’ language skills, quality must guide your choice.
✓ Expand provider selection criteria in your tender table
When preparing the tender table, it’s crucial not only to account for all the company’s needs but also to articulate your requirements in detail. This ensures you can thoroughly research and accurately evaluate provider proposals.
The rationale for narrowing down criteria in the tender table is understandable: instead of unsolicited marketing from providers, you receive a clear list of services and tools they offer. But here’s what actually happens. Under a loosely defined criterion like “availability of a learning platform,” providers who genuinely offer an interactive platform with digital textbooks may check the box — but so will those who:
By treating all providers as equal and selecting the lowest-cost proposal, a company may end up with:
Real example: A client chose a cheaper provider over YAPPI without verifying tender claims. Expectations? Cost savings and modern interactive platform lessons. Reality?
Sometimes, even after several lessons, it’s hard to assess a provider fully. But pre-contract research is possible. Detail your tender table. If it looks like this:
At first glance, this table appears to cover the essential questions, but in reality, it fails to provide any real understanding of what services you'll actually receive or their quality.
Gather input from all departments and staff involved in training decisions about the criteria they'll use to evaluate providers. Dedicate time to developing the fundamental requirements that we'll now examine in detail.
✓ Provider’s specialization, curriculum, and textbooks
Selecting a school that specializes exclusively in corporate English significantly increases your chances of working with competent instructors and optimized programs. While most providers now include corporate courses in their offerings, many lack the specialized experience and materials required for effective business language training.
A dedicated corporate language provider can:
When it comes to textbooks, you can request confirmation that they are written according to international standards and correspond to the knowledge level of your employees. If a school uses textbooks from major publishers such as Cambridge, Longman, etc., find out two important things:
The global idealization of British textbooks is undeniable. They dominate the market but often lag in localization and digitalization. The school should provide proof that their materials are up-to-date, locally adapted, and gathered on a single platform. Thanks to the work of a content management department, your lessons won’t focus on using a fax machine in the office or how Nokia is conquering the world, but rather on the latest developments in the world of artificial intelligence.
By the way, in the peak era of AI, it’s also worth checking whether the provider works with AI and how exactly — whether they optimize technical processes, use AI for content creation, or integrate it into their learning platform via API.
✓ Implementation of technological solutions for effective learning
A provider that is genuinely interested in their clients’ success invests in the technological component of their services. Interactive tools enhance learning effectiveness by increasing engagement, personalizing materials and tasks, and offering the ability to practice even without a teacher or group.
Based on our own digital ecosystem, we can highlight the following most effective tools:
Don’t miss the opportunity to attend a demo lesson and personally test all the features of the proposed platform.
✓ Teachers
In a typical foreign language teacher vacancy on recruitment websites, you will see the desired English level from B2 and a willingness to hire a student. However, in a tender, the requirements should go beyond just a higher education degree and a certificate of language proficiency. Consider the following:
Remember that a translator or philologist is not necessarily a qualified teacher. Pay attention to how the teacher’s qualifications and experience align with your requirements. Upon your request, the provider should provide their criteria for evaluating the expertise of teachers.
✓ Employer brand and corporate culture
A reliable provider not only sets high requirements for teachers but also offers appropriate working conditions, which you can check on job websites:
An English school should operate as a single organism. The client should have support from a manager, the teacher should have methodological support, and there should be departments for content development and HR, while the online platform should be supported by technical assistance. When everything works in sync, the teacher is fully prepared for their job.
It’s a good sign if the provider can talk about their R&D team and its work on lessons. Another advantage is when teachers can influence the process of creating programs and lessons by providing feedback on the lessons they’ve taught. Check the provider’s career page and find out how they’re doing with corporate culture. Some schools hire teachers for numbers and, regardless of their qualifications and experience, treat them simply as talking heads.
To find out what colleagues and teachers say about the working conditions, check the provider on DOU or forums. As one candidate honestly said during an interview, if the teacher is dissatisfied with these conditions, they will not perform their job effectively.
If the provider is slow to get in touch with you, fills out the tender documentation poorly or partially, leading to unnecessary clarifications, this might indicate that the training process will also be problematic.
On the other hand, the stability of a company is demonstrated by the following indicators:
Additionally, you can ask the provider for the contacts of three HR specialists from companies listed on the school’s website, who are currently studying or have studied there previously. Get live feedback about the training, communication, the school’s response to challenges, etc. You know about HR groups without us. However, pay attention to whether the HR of the English school is recommending you to study at their own school.
