I’ve Been Teaching English to My Engineer and Designer Co-workers — Benefits of English for Tech Professionals
I earned my TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certificate back in 2017. I have experienced teaching refugees at a community center in the States, and have been teaching working professionals (mostly those who work in a global organization) in Seoul, South Korea, on the side — hurray for the side hustle!
When I started my current role, some of my coworkers shortly found out that I teach English to adults outside of work, and asked me if I was interested in providing English classes in office.
I joined a growing tech start-up called Korea Credit Data (KCD) last year. Our team launched Cash Note, a financial service application that combines card transactions and authorizations, allowing merchants to ensure the totals at a glance — Cash Note currently has approximately 7 million users as of March 2021.
Most of the coworkers who wanted me to hold classes were engineers and designers. From there, we started to meet once a week for an hour to read tech blogs and share our life updates with each other (all in English!).
Why is it essential for tech professionals to learn English? What am I willing to contribute to my coworkers by providing them class free of charge?
My coworkers obviously feel much more comfortable speaking and reading in Korean than English at work as they were born and raised in Korea. However, English being the language of the Internet, they are exposed to countless of content in English at work on a daily basis: Googling, articles, videos, reference, you name it. Nearly more than half the content online is actually written in English!
Sure, they can take a peek at the articles that have been translated to Korean. However, they feel like there are always going to be drawbacks when it comes to reading content that has been translated by someone else instead of understanding it as it is written in English. How cool would that be if they (non-native speakers of English) don’t need to rely on translations or subtitles to process messages their favorite content conveys?
On top of learning from English content, my engineer coworkers constantly interact in English at work, with both computers and humans. To begin with, learning English would make programming constructs such as “do-while” and “if-else” so much more sense.
Engineers communicate with each other through international programming communities such as Stack Overflow and GitHub regardless of the projects/organizations they are involved in. I purely want my engineer coworkers to elaborate their work better and express their opinions by improving their English skills — and to watch endless clips of tutorials for their code without subtitles one day (wink wink).
Besides all the above, fluency in English will allow them to access a diversity of pop culture and entertainment. It is about experiencing multiculturalism.
Growing up bilingual, I was blessed to have an opportunity to broaden my horizons and experience the world with the appreciation of cultural intelligence. I want nothing but the best for my coworkers and want them to experience what I have experienced. A sense of growth at work along with the value of continuous education could be one of the most beneficial things an organization has to offer, in my opinion.
Time for me to go check out my students’ essays!
