Ask Roxana Ploetz what German speakers struggle with when they are learning the English language and she’ll tell you: it’s pronunciation. And specifically, Germans have a hard time pronouncing the article in English.
“We find it really hard to say ‘the.’ It’s a challenge for Germans. We struggle to make that fricative, dental sound and it ends up coming out something more like ‘ze’,” she says.
This is an insight that Roxana has gleaned in her role as Regional Director of Sales and Operations with Hult EF Corporate Education, one of the world’s foremost providers of language and communication solutions, coaching and leadership development training for companies and governments worldwide.
Roxana heads up one team in the organisation’s language programmes team based in Germany, with responsibility for a slew of German headquartered key accounts. She and her colleagues are charged with opening up the market and securing new business aligned to sales targets. It also falls to her team to ensure that operations run smoothly and that “customer success” targets are agreed and realised with the company’s clients. And it’s no small feat. Hult EF runs a host of language programmes, including its flagship Language Live: a state-of-the-art online ecosystem that is home to no fewer than 3000 teachers. Roxana’s clients are typically corporations with workforces in excess of 5000 people.
“Ours is a truly global organisation and a complex group. We leverage the different synergies within Hult EF Corporate Education and our parent, EF Education First, to roll out really transformational learning experience for organisations and individuals,” says Roxana.
“My team services the language and cultural needs of big companies in this region who have international reach and multicultural workforces. We’re aiming to offer them a one-stop shop to really shift language and cultural capabilities at scale.”
Language learning backed by technology
Where Hult EF and EF Education First differ from other education providers—and from a number of new, on-demand language apps—is the technical, global and academic clout they bring, she explains. The organisation enlists expert teams of linguists and leverages AI and big data to surface specific challenges in language acquisition—native German speakers’ troubles pronouncing the English word “the” among them—and to create and enhance products that make learning both relevant and efficient.
It's a dynamic and exciting world to inhabit, says Roxana.
“Our experts really analyse how your mother tongue impacts the way you learn different languages; the way that German has its peculiarities that shape our pronunciation of English as a foreign language. So we bring real academic rigour to the development of our programmes,” she explains. “But we also deliver a hand-in-glove experience to our clients. We really focus on the project management dimensions of our business such that our clients—learners in big corporations with busy schedules and responsibilities—always feel accompanied and supported.”
Hult EF clients come in different sizes and shapes, says Roxana. But typically they share a need to upskill their workforce to enhance team leadership across borders.
“Maybe a company has operations in several different regions, and its managers are responsible for really diverse and often remote teams. Or maybe they’re hiring people internationally,” she says. “So they are looking for language and culture upskilling solutions to meet their leadership, operational and mobility need. And they come to us to find those solutions under one roof.”
A dynamic environment
English remains the international language of business, says Roxana, and accounts for around 90% of market needs. Her team is also responsible for German-language programmes for internationally-headquartered organisations that have operations in the DACH region. And the work is consistently dynamic and exciting, she says.
“We are responsible for sales and operations, so no one week—let alone one day—resembles another. On the sales side, I have an overview of the different cycles that different companies have each quarter, so the work here is about accompanying my team in driving market exposure, joining client meetings and ensuring that we make the kinds of proposals that meet needs and map to cycles.”
On the operations side, her work is focused on driving consistency around client success; partnering with organisations as they grow to ensure that adoption, progress and global acceptance of Hult EF language programmes are sustained.
“We’re a very sales-driven organisation and there’s a lot going on all the time in terms of being with clients and supporting them. But internally too, things never stop. We’re continuously interviewing and hiring the kind of talent that we need to build our market strategy and grow. So the workload is huge and we’re constantly juggling a lot of balls.”
Sustaining this kind of pace works because of what Roxana describes as the “entrepreneurial spirit” of the organisation: a set of values, beliefs and behaviours that drive organisational culture and an environment that “never stands still.”
“We have such a strong culture of being speedy and ad hoc at Hult EF,” she says.” At a global brand level and in every workplace, ours is a culture that encourages you to challenge things, to improve things; to have ideas and to run with them. Failure is not feared here if it comes with learning and there’s a constant question or challenge to each of us: what would you do if this was your own company?”
And it’s this culture that attracted her to work for the company; that and a meeting with recruiters at a CEMS career fair in Vienna in 2015. Hult EF, says Roxana, was “the one:” a company and people that both inspired her and instilled a passion that simply felt right.
“I think for lots of CEMSies there’s a kind of traditional route you take that leads you into consultancy or finance. And it can be overwhelming as a young person starting out – you maybe haven’t fully found yourself yet. But for me it was really important to find a company that really inspired me,” she says. “You know, you spend so much of your time at work in this life, you owe it to yourself to feel inspired. I really believe the company you choose has to fit and make sense to you.”
Finding your place
Working in education is an excellent fit for Roxana. It’s a world that is intensely focused on growth, change and improvement. And at Hult EF – which believes in helping people to release their ability to drive positive change - she has found an environment that has encouraged her to grow—as a person and as a leader. Over the last two years that she has held the role of team leader, she has gained key insights into the responsibility that comes with leadership; and the influence she has over other people’s wellbeing and development.
“When I think about people who have led me in the past, I think most about how they have made me feel: how they have inspired me and encourage me to grow. As a leader myself, I make it a priority to try to be authentic in what I say and do, and to be open to receiving feedback as well as giving it.”
As a leader, Roxana says that her understanding of others is always undergirded by a belief that people intrinsically try to do their best and bring their best intentions to the workplace. It’s a belief that finds its roots in her experience as a CEMS student, she says.
“CEMS is a journey that exposes you to so much diversity and the opportunity to work and collaborate with so many people. And there’s a curiosity that underpins your experience and that of others that I’ve brought into my own professional life and my leadership practice. As a result, I chose to believe that people are always trying their best, and that as a leader it’s down to you to ensure that they feel valued in their work every day.”
Roxana would encourage CEMSies emerging into the workplace today to truly leverage the CEMS experience as she did, and to step into the job-seeking process with confidence and resilience: to trust, she says, in skills and competencies and to have faith in the knowledge that “you will find your place.”
“Recruitment can feel overwhelming and you may experience rejection, but I’d really encourage young people to connect with their passion and trust that if they work hard they will achieve the success they want,” says Roxana.
“And CEMSies should definitely investigate the opportunities that we offer here at Hult EF and EF Education First. We offer so many opportunities to try out different roles and geographies, it’s a roller coaster—but a good one!” she laughs. “We work hard, and we play hard too. It’s a lot of fun.”