Corporate Teaching after SARS
(This article also appear on www.eastcathay.com)
I have said before that SARS is hammering the corporate teaching market. I predict that in the medium-run, it will do a lot more to the market than that. My feeling is that SARS will effectively put corporate teaching in Taiwan to an end.
As it stands today, almost all the corporate English providers have been hit extremely hard by SARS. Teachers I know who have make made as much as nt$100,000/month are down into the low 30's now. Despite promises from their managers, there is no end in sight. Clients are asking to reschedule classes, and clients that have ended contracts are not renewing. Companies are suddenly starting to show interest in ideas about teaching at a distance that they until recently were quite hostile about.
A more direct attack on corporate English teaching is coming from the reorganization of company structure that is occurring in light of Taiwan's continued attack from natural disaster. In case you've missed all the excitement, the past three years in Taiwan have witnessed an earthquake, a flood, and the most recent plague. Firms have been slow to pick up on the permanence of this situation, but they are finally starting to move. Companies are splitting their operations into two or more locations; the reasoning being that if half the company is wiped out, they can continue work.
In the past, one of the major issues operating in Taiwan was training. Most of the computer hardware in the world was produced here and on the market before it got anywhere else. Keeping up with advances in technology, business, and world events was crucial to continuing a smooth operation. With the reality of the contemporary Taiwan setting in, logistics is becoming the new issue; how to keep a company going when you can't get people or products to their destination.
Regardless of the answers that emerge from this situation, for English teaching, gone are the days when companies would shovel money at programs that produce little observable result. Companies have bigger issues on their mind and for their workers to spend time answering than the marginal amount of improvement that accrues from a couple of hours a week with a foreign teacher.
Corporate teaching will continue of course. There will always be workers that need improved English skills. There will always be senior managers whose reputation as a leader needs to include foreign language fluency. And there always will be companies like Proctor and Gamble that demand all internal company correspondence be in English. But let's just say that if I had money, it wouldn't be on corporate English teaching making a come back anytime soon .
3:02:55 PM 
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