Employability and English Language Skills
English language skills and employability are interrelated. The better the skills an individual has in English, the higher their scope of employability is. It is also a known fact that employment retention and career enhancement are the next challenges, post securing an employment. Effective communication skill in English is one of the biggest factors affecting this. This is the reason why most prominent institutes across the country have English language development courses for their students. Such courses are designed to teach English as a skill, so as to enhance their English language competencies along with their technical or professional knowledge. Many a corporate organisation in fact, is known to connect with various institutions to ensure that such skills are imbibed by their students while still at the institute.
The weightage attributed to language skills and other soft skills for acquiring a job is thus quite high. With more and more business houses going global and working in competitive environments due to the changed world economy, the need to acquire or inherit competencies becomes imperative to merely survive in the market. This truth applies to both the employer and the employee. With English being the business communication language of most companies, the skill to communicate in English with clients, both overseas and domestic, goes beyond merely understanding and framing correct sentences to the ability to apply interpersonal skills, presentation skills or negotiation skills.
In the corporate world, proficiency to use English as the language of business communication is seen as a tool to ensure positive business outcomes, something that will produce beneficial results. Thus, for its employees to be considered as ‘assets’ and seen as ‘contributors’ to the growth of the organisation, his qualification, aptitude, personal attitude and his English communication skills become important factors. It is this seen that, during campus interviews and other hiring processes, companies look for potential employees who display such competencies.
As already stated, professional institutes have now started ensuring that English as a skill is given due importance in its curriculum. The students are prepared for successfully cracking their interviews and helping them enter the job market. These students are later expected to up their skills constantly to sustain themselves in the competitive professional world. A course that is designed to provide the students with opportunities in listening and speaking in English is helpful in such a scenario. Students who may not have had the opportunity to use English as their language of day to day transaction benefit from such a course while the language proficiency of other students will also improve.
A good language lab will be especially helpful to achieve this. Predesigned courses, prepared using standardized teaching-learning formula to cater to the functional requirement of language learning will ensure that the students actually learn the language. The content should in fact meet the language learning needs of all different levels of proficiencies so that all students benefit from it. Enhancement of pronunciation skills and removal of common errors creeping into use through regionalism should also be addressed.
Words Worth English language lab provides such teaching content. The students and teachers benefit through the use of the software making the teaching and learning process interesting and fruitful. The content based on the parameters proposed by CEFR, caters to all the six levels and ensures enhancement in the English language proficiency levels of the students, thus preparing them for the job market.