Business English
Teaching English is big business in Poland, but long gone are the days when schools could simply throw open their doors and watch the students roll in. Quirky advertising, technology and home or office lessons are the weapens being wielded in the battle for clients, but some students say schools are cutting corners to rein in costs - dragging down the quality of lessons.
Teaching English in Poland used to mean nearly instant profits. After the market opened up in the early 1990s, just about anybody with passable English and a couple of dusty workbooks could open up their own school, and Poles eager to enter the brave new world of the West were willing to pay top-dollar for any kind of exposure to English. In 1991 there were over 500 language schools registered in Warsaw alone, though less than 10 of them could claim a large slice of the market.
Now language schools, and those that teach English in particular, have become victims of their own success. Schools grew, and bigger, international institutes got into the game, all looking for their slice of the sector. There are over 150 large or medium-sized English-focused language schools in Warsaw today, all fighting for ever-dwindling shares of the market. If you pile on the smaller schools and the independent teachers working either legally or in the shadows, the market is being stretched thinner than ever. In 2003 the top 10 schools by turnover combined for under zł.88 million in revenue - 44 percent of which was earned by the top money-maker, Empik.
New vocabulary
That's presenting problems for the market. The glut put price pressure on schools, forcing them to adopt the more Western marketing methods of offering discounts - something previously unknown to the Polish language-service industry.
"In 2003 there was almost a dumping war between schools," says Grażyna Słowikowska, president at Berlitz Poland. She says supermarkets and other FMG industries began slashing prices by 40 or 50 percent, and soon language services were on the bandwagon.
"This trend was quite a novelty for us," she says. "The buying behavior of people changed, because being bombarded by this kind of selling, people would say: 'you need to give me a discount.' And if they didn't hear about a discount anything close to 40 or 50 percent, they'd say: 'well, everyone else is giving 50 percent.' So this in turn forced different behaviors on pricing and selling strategy, because you have to adjust to what the market wants." Translation: schools were forced to lower their prices.
Making up
But when prices are cut, so too are services, and small and large schools have coped with the crunch in different ways. Berlitz was forced to lower its margins and cut free makeup lessons it offered students who missed meetings during vacation - a service which it had thought brought an advantage over the competition.
"This was an extremely high cost for us, and we didn't believe it was greatly valued by the customer," says Słowikowska. "It was costing us a lot of money and we had to cut it."
Ad trap
Mike Mills English - a smaller school with about 280 students - didn't have the luxury of cutting services. While bigger companies redoubled their marketing efforts (and budgets) with schemes such as bus adverts or kilted brochure-distributors, Mike Mills English decided to save money by cutting back on advertising outlays. Its ads in the paper stood the school out from the crowd six years ago when it opened up, but now with so many schools and similar offers it makes little sense, says the school's owner and namesake, Mike Mills.
"If you're a customer and you've got 20 schools all offering the same thing, you've got 20 things to look at that all look the same. I would imagine most people - if they don't know the brand - they're going to ring up three or four people and they're going to go with the cheapest. For us to put advertisments in, we're fighting a losing battle," he says.
"I know one school who decided to invest very heavily in advertising two years ago and they basically had saturation advertising - in papers, on the street, you name it, they did it - and when they got their recruitment in in September they realized it had cost them zł.600 per student in advertising. That's scary because if you go to all that time and trouble - and more importantly, money - and you don't get the students, then you're hurting," explains Mills.
Of course, for any school, the biggest costs come in the form of teachers. But despite a weaker economy two years ago, finding a way to cut teacher expenses proved a hard nut to crack.
Tasking teachers
"No one will work for a salary lower than a certain level, so we couldn't really lower rates for teachers," says Małgorzata Bastjan, manager of the education department at EMPiK. Many teachers can make an easy living from their own private lessons, often stealing students from the very schools they work for. Usually they depended on a formal institution only for a guaranteed steady income or a work permit. Under such circumstances, expats can afford to be choosy when searching for teaching jobs.
"That's one of the strange things about the market," says Mills. "English teachers are almost a throwback to 1970's England - there was this culture within the workplace, of 'well I just come in and do my work and everything will be wonderful and I'll get paid a lot and if anything goes wrong it's not my problem' - I'm very lucky that the teachers that I have are very motivated and do a very good job, but they're also paid extremely well. But it's incredibly difficult to get them. It's almost as if market forces were turned on their head."
The ZUS effect
In addition, in 1998 social insurance (ZUS) rules were changed so that companies were required to cover ZUS costs for employees working as independent contractors (as most native speakers do). As a result, costs rocketed.
"This put 48 percent extra on top of teaching costs. There is no business that could take a 48 percent increase in its costs, and teaching is the biggest cost item that we have," says Berlitz's Słowikowska.
Native tongue
Therefore, many language schools turned to native Poles to teach some or all of their lessons. Polish teachers often work for less than their native-speaking counterparts (though no company we spoke with admitted to paying Poles less than foreigners), and since they don't have to go through the rigamarole of obtaining permanent resident status before opening up their own company, they can immediately begin paying their own ZUS. Schools deny that using Polish instructors hurt quality, but anecdotes abound of students learning from teachers who trill their Rs or pronounce the word 'technology' as if the 'ch' were an opportunity to clear their throat.
Schools that use Polish instructors argue that this makes little difference. "There are levels where a native speaker isn't needed - when someone doesn't know grammar at all, for example," says EMPiK's Bastjan.
Language of disaster
But there are also horror stories. A former teacher who declined to be named told us about her experiences at a prominent Warsaw school, who, for a lack of cheap teachers from countries like America, England, Austrialia or even Poland, began hiring 'native speakers' from African countries where English is one of the official languages, though that rarely meant the teacher was fluent. "Everywhere there were 'native speakers' who could hardly speak English. They weren't even understandable," she says.
However, the Westernization of the market means such tactics are less and less likely to work. "The average customer is much more quality-oriented today than he was years ago where he would just assume that a private school would be better than the public education system," says Słowikowska. "Now people are more careful in their choice."
Quality clause
That means institutes must now conform to the customer's standards by offering a wider array of services. New technologies were quickly added to offers. DVD and internet lessons are now standard, as are CD ROMs with every workbook.
But customers are also demanding convenience, and while they may have settled for a lesson in a classroom a few years ago, more and more are looking for schools who can bring the teacher to them.
Great lengths
"Those smaller schools who make their students come to them will fall out of the market," says Jan Burda, owner of Johnny Languages. His teachers don't teach in a school at all, but travel to every lesson, whether it be a business or a private home - free of charge.
Such arrangements are becoming increasingly popular with companies, as employers and employees both want to maximize time. With their big HR budgets, schools love to snap up company lessons, and just about every large school now offers the possibility for corporate clients to learn in the comfort of their own office. Some schools go quite literally to great lengths to tap into in-office learning.
"We have schools where teachers are away from their home city for a week. We have contracts from Katowice by which we service a power plant in the mountains," says Słowikowska.
Future imperfect
Still, customers aren't satisfied, and businesses continue to offer everything from summer camps to lessons in 'exotic' languages like Flemish and Faeroese. Soon, many will be offering virtual lessons, allowing instructors to teach tongues from anywhere on the planet. As Słowikowska says, the time when schools could sit back and watch the money roll in is long gone.
"In the past stability was one of those very valued things. You have to be flexible and you have to react quicker than ever before. Now the key word is change."
For those schools who want to continue speaking the patois of profits, it's a word they'll have to add to their vocabulary.
Teaching English in Poland used to mean nearly instant profits. After the market opened up in the early 1990s, just about anybody with passable English and a couple of dusty workbooks could open up their own school, and Poles eager to enter the brave new world of the West were willing to pay top-dollar for any kind of exposure to English. In 1991 there were over 500 language schools registered in Warsaw alone, though less than 10 of them could claim a large slice of the market.
Now language schools, and those that teach English in particular, have become victims of their own success. Schools grew, and bigger, international institutes got into the game, all looking for their slice of the sector. There are over 150 large or medium-sized English-focused language schools in Warsaw today, all fighting for ever-dwindling shares of the market. If you pile on the smaller schools and the independent teachers working either legally or in the shadows, the market is being stretched thinner than ever. In 2003 the top 10 schools by turnover combined for under zł.88 million in revenue - 44 percent of which was earned by the top money-maker, Empik.
New vocabulary
That's presenting problems for the market. The glut put price pressure on schools, forcing them to adopt the more Western marketing methods of offering discounts - something previously unknown to the Polish language-service industry.
"In 2003 there was almost a dumping war between schools," says Grażyna Słowikowska, president at Berlitz Poland. She says supermarkets and other FMG industries began slashing prices by 40 or 50 percent, and soon language services were on the bandwagon.
"This trend was quite a novelty for us," she says. "The buying behavior of people changed, because being bombarded by this kind of selling, people would say: 'you need to give me a discount.' And if they didn't hear about a discount anything close to 40 or 50 percent, they'd say: 'well, everyone else is giving 50 percent.' So this in turn forced different behaviors on pricing and selling strategy, because you have to adjust to what the market wants." Translation: schools were forced to lower their prices.
Making up
But when prices are cut, so too are services, and small and large schools have coped with the crunch in different ways. Berlitz was forced to lower its margins and cut free makeup lessons it offered students who missed meetings during vacation - a service which it had thought brought an advantage over the competition.
"This was an extremely high cost for us, and we didn't believe it was greatly valued by the customer," says Słowikowska. "It was costing us a lot of money and we had to cut it."
Ad trap
Mike Mills English - a smaller school with about 280 students - didn't have the luxury of cutting services. While bigger companies redoubled their marketing efforts (and budgets) with schemes such as bus adverts or kilted brochure-distributors, Mike Mills English decided to save money by cutting back on advertising outlays. Its ads in the paper stood the school out from the crowd six years ago when it opened up, but now with so many schools and similar offers it makes little sense, says the school's owner and namesake, Mike Mills.
"If you're a customer and you've got 20 schools all offering the same thing, you've got 20 things to look at that all look the same. I would imagine most people - if they don't know the brand - they're going to ring up three or four people and they're going to go with the cheapest. For us to put advertisments in, we're fighting a losing battle," he says.
"I know one school who decided to invest very heavily in advertising two years ago and they basically had saturation advertising - in papers, on the street, you name it, they did it - and when they got their recruitment in in September they realized it had cost them zł.600 per student in advertising. That's scary because if you go to all that time and trouble - and more importantly, money - and you don't get the students, then you're hurting," explains Mills.
Of course, for any school, the biggest costs come in the form of teachers. But despite a weaker economy two years ago, finding a way to cut teacher expenses proved a hard nut to crack.
Tasking teachers
"No one will work for a salary lower than a certain level, so we couldn't really lower rates for teachers," says Małgorzata Bastjan, manager of the education department at EMPiK. Many teachers can make an easy living from their own private lessons, often stealing students from the very schools they work for. Usually they depended on a formal institution only for a guaranteed steady income or a work permit. Under such circumstances, expats can afford to be choosy when searching for teaching jobs.
"That's one of the strange things about the market," says Mills. "English teachers are almost a throwback to 1970's England - there was this culture within the workplace, of 'well I just come in and do my work and everything will be wonderful and I'll get paid a lot and if anything goes wrong it's not my problem' - I'm very lucky that the teachers that I have are very motivated and do a very good job, but they're also paid extremely well. But it's incredibly difficult to get them. It's almost as if market forces were turned on their head."
The ZUS effect
In addition, in 1998 social insurance (ZUS) rules were changed so that companies were required to cover ZUS costs for employees working as independent contractors (as most native speakers do). As a result, costs rocketed.
"This put 48 percent extra on top of teaching costs. There is no business that could take a 48 percent increase in its costs, and teaching is the biggest cost item that we have," says Berlitz's Słowikowska.
Native tongue
Therefore, many language schools turned to native Poles to teach some or all of their lessons. Polish teachers often work for less than their native-speaking counterparts (though no company we spoke with admitted to paying Poles less than foreigners), and since they don't have to go through the rigamarole of obtaining permanent resident status before opening up their own company, they can immediately begin paying their own ZUS. Schools deny that using Polish instructors hurt quality, but anecdotes abound of students learning from teachers who trill their Rs or pronounce the word 'technology' as if the 'ch' were an opportunity to clear their throat.
Schools that use Polish instructors argue that this makes little difference. "There are levels where a native speaker isn't needed - when someone doesn't know grammar at all, for example," says EMPiK's Bastjan.
Language of disaster
But there are also horror stories. A former teacher who declined to be named told us about her experiences at a prominent Warsaw school, who, for a lack of cheap teachers from countries like America, England, Austrialia or even Poland, began hiring 'native speakers' from African countries where English is one of the official languages, though that rarely meant the teacher was fluent. "Everywhere there were 'native speakers' who could hardly speak English. They weren't even understandable," she says.
However, the Westernization of the market means such tactics are less and less likely to work. "The average customer is much more quality-oriented today than he was years ago where he would just assume that a private school would be better than the public education system," says Słowikowska. "Now people are more careful in their choice."
Quality clause
That means institutes must now conform to the customer's standards by offering a wider array of services. New technologies were quickly added to offers. DVD and internet lessons are now standard, as are CD ROMs with every workbook.
But customers are also demanding convenience, and while they may have settled for a lesson in a classroom a few years ago, more and more are looking for schools who can bring the teacher to them.
Great lengths
"Those smaller schools who make their students come to them will fall out of the market," says Jan Burda, owner of Johnny Languages. His teachers don't teach in a school at all, but travel to every lesson, whether it be a business or a private home - free of charge.
Such arrangements are becoming increasingly popular with companies, as employers and employees both want to maximize time. With their big HR budgets, schools love to snap up company lessons, and just about every large school now offers the possibility for corporate clients to learn in the comfort of their own office. Some schools go quite literally to great lengths to tap into in-office learning.
"We have schools where teachers are away from their home city for a week. We have contracts from Katowice by which we service a power plant in the mountains," says Słowikowska.
Future imperfect
Still, customers aren't satisfied, and businesses continue to offer everything from summer camps to lessons in 'exotic' languages like Flemish and Faeroese. Soon, many will be offering virtual lessons, allowing instructors to teach tongues from anywhere on the planet. As Słowikowska says, the time when schools could sit back and watch the money roll in is long gone.
"In the past stability was one of those very valued things. You have to be flexible and you have to react quicker than ever before. Now the key word is change."
For those schools who want to continue speaking the patois of profits, it's a word they'll have to add to their vocabulary.
