Or: what twenty years of IT consultancy taught me about teaching English
I came to language teaching sideways, which I’d argue is the only honest way to arrive anywhere useful. Before Malta, before the CertTESOL, I spent the better part of two decades as an IT consultant in London: specifying systems, fixing what other people had broken, explaining to committees why the thing they wanted wasn’t the thing they’d asked for. Not obviously adjacent to teaching Business English. And yet.
What that work actually taught me, it turns out, is what most of my students already know and won’t quite admit: that competence and communication are two entirely separate skills, and organisations reward the second one more than they’d like to think.
I’ve watched genuinely capable people, engineers, analysts, the sort who solve the actual problem while everyone else is still describing it, lose the room in a meeting because their English didn’t move at the speed their thinking did. Not because their English was bad. Because it was cautious. Fluency under pressure isn’t about vocabulary; it’s about not needing all your processing power just to construct the sentence, so some of it’s left over for the argument.
Since 2015 I’ve been teaching Business English and exam preparation in Malta, including a run tutoring Master’s candidates at the University of Malta, a useful reminder that ‘advanced’ learners still trip on the same things: hedging too much, translating idiom literally, mistaking formality for precision when it’s usually the opposite. I moved most of my teaching online from 2018 onward, well before it was fashionable, mostly because Gozo’s ferry schedule made in-person consistency a fantasy.
None of this is really about ‘language as passport to global opportunity’, whatever the LinkedIn infographics say. It’s narrower and less romantic than that: if you can say the precise thing, at the moment it needs saying, in front of the people who decide things, you get to keep making decisions. If you can’t, someone with worse ideas but better delivery gets there first. That’s not fair, particularly. It’s just how meetings work.
If that sounds like a problem you recognise, in yourself, or in someone on your team who’s quietly brilliant and quietly overlooked, that’s the kind of thing I actually spend my lessons on.