English at Work

The National Immigration Forum (the Forum) created English at Work (EAW) to provide a bridge between employees seeking to increase English proficiency and employers seeking to upskill, retain and promote a diverse workforce. A blended training program, EAW is a worksite-based contextualized English training for limited English proficient (LEP) employees that offers 40% live instruction and 60% online learning hosted on our customized learning management system (LMS). In-person instruction is provided at the worksite or on campus by instructors from over 50 accredited community colleges throughout the country. The fully remote version of EAW is offered through a digital platform with an integrated virtual classroom. Access to English language learning supports the integration of LEP employees into the workforce by aiding with customer service, worksite safety, worker retention and overall productivity. For employees, it assists with establishing career pathways, job stability, economic mobility and family security.

There is consistent evidence that a lack of English proficiency has limited the ability of individuals to thrive in their workplaces and to access career pathways. Furthermore, there is a positive correlation between earnings and English language ability. The American Community Survey (S1601) reports that LEP workers make 24-39% less than their English proficient counterparts, depending on their level of educational attainment. Approximately 1 out of 10 working age adults in the United States have limited English language skills, and this limitation is holding many workers back from being better employees, advancing and achieving upward mobility. Limited English skills can also hinder business competitiveness. 

 Over 6 million LEP workers are employed in the retail, manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, and service sectors, all of which rely heavily on team communication and customer interaction. Without improved English skills, employees will continue to be limited to low skill responsibilities that overlook their experience and talent, and employers will continue to struggle with filling middle skill level positions and high employee turnover costs.  Increased English language proficiency leads to higher employee satisfaction and retention, increased wages and job promotions, and a more skilled and capable workforce.

Our solution is English at Work: a scalable, cost effective English training that benefits employers and employees. Workplace education benefits employers by improving employee retention, advancement, and productivity as well as company diversity and competitiveness. Furthermore, improved English skills build employees’ confidence, improve team communication, create better understanding of safety guidelines, improve customer interactions as well as improved access to job training and credentialing programs.

EAW provides industry-contextualized English learning programs that are customized for companies' operational needs. We provide full implementation assistance for employers and a wide range of help desk services for students. EAW combines 40% in-person instruction by community college faculty with 60% online learning through interactive digital modules designed for English learners with limited digital skills. Our online modules are optimized for use on smartphones, tablets, and computers. Our unique curriculum includes industry-specific vocabulary and competencies that are critical to improved team communication. We also offer a fully online training model to serve employees in remote geographic locations looking to develop English proficiency. This program consists of 7 modules taught over the course of 12-16 weeks, with the ability to accommodate the needs of workers at any skill level in the same class.

Our target population is limited English proficient foreign-born workers. We specifically target industries with a high proportion of LEP workers, such as retail, manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, accommodation, and foodservice industry sectors that collectively employ 43% of all LEP workers.

EAW provides company-customized and industry-contextualized English training that enables any LEP worker to improve their English language, and in some cases technological, skills. Research shows that ESL classes have an average retention rate of only 30%, so engagement, motivation, and celebration are among our top priorities. We have found that involving company leadership is the key to addressing all of our priorities. We customize the training based on the company’s most pressing needs and in the places where language barriers affect job performance. We invite leadership to welcome employees to the program, celebrate their training completion at a worksite graduation, and consider accomplishments in English learning when considering employee promotions. By encouraging these practices, EAW has maintained a 70% to 80% retention rate.

To better understand and serve our target population, we survey program participants pre- and post-training to learn about their goals and areas of improvement. We then incorporate learnings from these surveys into our curriculum and tool development.

We are able to provide high quality English training to foreign-born workers and reach a large volume of the LEP workforce by partnering with the corporations that employ them and implementing our programs at the worksite. EAW is committed to providing LEP workers with an accessible, effective program that gives them the skillset they need to succeed in their current positions, enables them to pursue re-skilling programs, as needed, and allows them to fully realize their experience and talents. The skills and opportunities that EAW participants gain simultaneously grant them increased potential for career advancement and economic mobility.

Full Time: 2

Part Time: 2

Contractors: 7 + instructors (includes curriculum and tech partners, business outreach consultant, and interns)

The National Immigration Forum strives to maintain diverse representation on its Board of Directors and staff, including race, ethnicity, gender and constituency. Our organization’s staff and governance does reflect this diversity. We continue to draw upon diverse perspectives in the field that our work serves by recruiting board members who are members of relevant organizations and institutions that support the Forum’s mission, particularly within our center-right constituency building. The need to search out center-right individuals who are members of relevant organizations and institutions has somewhat limited our ability to recruit for racial and ethnic diversity.

The Forum’s corporation engagement team sits at the nexus of private sector training needs, foreign-born worker aspirations, and cutting-edge workforce development programming, policy and advocacy.

There are several programs on the market that workers could use to learn English, such as for-profit solutions DuoLingo, Voxy, Burlington, Rosetta Stone, and Babbel, to name a few. These programs offer broad coverage of the English language and require individual users (in most cases) to pay for services, whereas philanthropy and corporations invest in and financially support EAW, providing the training to employees free of charge. Furthermore, there is no program like EAW that offers industry-contextualized and company-specific English learning, taught live by accredited community college instructors and accessible at the worksite.

Our training models were designed to not only increase language skills but also to improve adjacent soft skills and boost confidence. In addition, our blended models build the digital skills necessary for work performance and ensuring equitable access to career opportunities. By partnering with community colleges, EAW opens doors to continuing education opportunities that may not otherwise be accessible. And finally, we support employers interested in incorporating best practices in immigrant integration at the worksite, build an attractive benefits package and increase their qualified, diverse pool of candidates for middle skill positions. 

EAW is a hybrid training that consists of 40% live instruction (in-person or remotely) and 60% online learning. The training is delivered through an online learning platform hosted on Moodle, an open source LMS that we customized to meet our participants’ needs. This platform is used to deliver online learning content, launch the virtual classroom, share instructor repository and tools, administer pre- and post-tests, collect participant data and track their progress.

Our fully remote training model uses BigBlueButton, a video conferencing tool designed to teach remote students online to deliver synchronous instruction. This tool is easy to navigate for inexperienced users, fully integrates with our platform and is completely browser based, which does not require additional app or extension downloads.

The learning platform, the video conferencing tool and all training content are optimized for mobile use. The training can be fully completed on desktop, tablet or smartphone, through the Moodle mobile app, which is free.

All the technology tools adopted by EAW are customized to ensure success from the first click. The tools are easily accessible by learners with low digital literacy and are highly adaptable, with robust integration options, online tutorials and other resources for both administrators and learners. Our help desk team provides high-touch support to learners from onboarding to graduation. The platform interface is very simple and clean, yet highly engaging using light text and visuals. The self-paced digital modules are designed using the Articulate software and include interactive learning activities, games, listening comprehension exercises and videos.

Our hybrid and fully remote models of instruction were developed to allow our solution to scale and to become an industry standard for English language training at the worksite. The hybrid model can provide up to 100 hours of contextualized language instruction at the worksite, and at the same time put little or no stress on employer operations. The in-person or live instruction is always scheduled adjacent to work shifts and is reinforced with additional hours of anywhere, anytime learning online. The remote model allows learners to connect and interact with their teachers and classmates from anywhere using their computer, tablet or smartphone, thus addressing computer and broadband access. These models were inspired by the rapid trends in workplace education as well as, more broadly, trends in the future of learning.

Our class retention rate averages 70% to 80%. Even cohorts who switched from in-person to virtual instruction due to the pandemic had a 75% retention rate. Furthermore, 75% of participants who responded to our feedback survey told us they enjoy the remote class and are glad the class was moved online rather than being cancelled.

Most of our learners have been first time technology users for learning English, yet they have embraced the tools used to deliver instruction and learning. With proactive support from our helpdesk, and content optimized for mobile devices, our learners have completed on average 5 out of 6 online course modules.

In fulfillment of our mission, the Forum advances the needs of the immigrant workforce through the provision of innovative immigrant integration services and the strategic engagement of corporate America in the policy debate, among other work. The Forum believes, that for America to succeed, immigrants must have the skills and opportunity to thrive. EAW allows companies to better integrate their immigrant workforce and lift up their voices to create change in policies that directly impact their workforce.

Over the next year, we will continue to promote and market our contextualized English language training as a critical business tool for retention, upskilling and re-skilling the LEP workforce. We will engage with more employers to advocate for immigrants and immigration and encourage their leaders to do the same. Furthermore, we plan on expanding our curriculum by adding contextualized English programs for the healthcare and hospitality industries, as well as adapting our retail curriculum to better fit the food delivery sector. Additionally, we hope to launch our California campaign, as described below.

Long term, we plan to successfully launch our California Campaign, allowing us to offer English training to 6,000 LEP workers across multiple industries in California. We will accomplish this by implementing EAW in 20-30 companies with large LEP workforces in California. Moreover, we plan to build out the corporate trainer model, wherein a qualified corporate trainer is trained by our team to offer in person instruction and assistance with self-paced online learning. Our financial goal is to make the program self-sustaining and potentially profit-generating. We can achieve this by leveraging our philanthropic support to build corporate confidence in the program, therefore encouraging businesses to purchase our program. Our overarching goal is to make it a standard practice to have contextualized English training at the workplace.

Maintaining participant retention rates and engaging new employer partners will be difficult due to the ongoing pandemic, which exacerbated some of the challenges employers already faced. From our continued outreach and engagement with employers, we learned that some companies are forced to lay off talent in certain areas of work but hire in others, which may require upskilling or reskilling of the current workforce. Lack of English skills may severely limit foreign worker access to these opportunities, creating inequities in the workplace. While our team is very intentional about engaging companies that employ large numbers of immigrant workers and also grapple with skills gaps, we find that they don’t always prioritize language training as a solution to these gaps.

The next 2-3 years will also be a crucial time for EAW to conquer our financial hurdles. Currently, we rely on private philanthropic donations and revenue from businesses purchasing our program. To achieve sustainability, we will have to diversify our revenue stream. We will have to figure out how to increase corporate confidence in our program. This will allow us to implement EAW in more workplaces across the nation. The more businesses that purchase our English training program, the more we can maximize profitability and lower costs.

To continue expanding over the next five years, particularly regarding our California Campaign, we still need to raise the philanthropic support necessary to offset costs and recruit the business partners to meet our goal of 6,000 Californians served. 

To form relationships with more employers, we will be more persistent with electronic communication efforts and utilize webinars and video conferences to facilitate valuable and informative conversations with potential partners.

To work towards a sustainable financial model, we plan to leverage philanthropic support, which will increase corporate confidence. By exploring partnerships with more employers across the private and public sectors, we will diversify our revenue stream and increase employer investment.

We also want to learn from partners in the workforce development space what works to engage employers during these uncertain times. We will keep up with latest trends and innovation in workforce development by adopting best and promising practices.

To combat our California Campaign's challenges, we will continue to meet with funders, businesses, and community colleges to determine what industry-specific English training is needed the most in California. We will again meet with groups and organizations that can assist with our instruction infrastructure's technical needs. Furthermore, we participate in the Retail Opportunity Network and the Digital US coalition for the additional resources they provide.

As part of our efforts to scale English at Work, we are looking to better market this training solution to more companies with large foreign-born workforces from multiple sectors. To achieve this, we would like to expand our ROI metrics to include: extended 1 and 2-year follow-up with participants post-training to collect data on job retention, promotion, and continuing education. We also plan to streamline our individual student reporting by integrating in-person with online learning reports. We will customize reports in the LMS to include progress on the digital modules and scores on end-of-module quizzes. While this individual participant data is not shared, instructors and our project team will support learners better. These additional metrics will help us develop a formalized credential for training completion and potentially combined with other industry credentials.

Ali Noorani, President and CEO of the Forum, is the son of Pakistani immigrants, and has a lifetime of experience building relationships with people from all backgrounds. He previously served as the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, and can be frequently found on major media outlets speaking on immigration politics and policy. His abundance of direct experience with the immigrant community and with immigration advocacy makes him an extremely qualified leader of the organization under which EAW is found.

Emily Foster, Vice President of Corporate Engagement, comes to the Forum from Cummins, where she spent two decades working in government relations. Emily played a critical role in developing the company’s position on immigration policy. Given her deep experience, Emily is keenly aware of the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for our corporate engagement and worksite integration programs and is well positioned to take our integration work to the next level.

The manager of our solution team, Ana Negoescu, immigrated to the United States from Bucharest, Romania. She has spent much of her career working in immigrant-serving organizations, advocacy networks and coalitions. In her role as Assistant Vice President of Integration Programs, she is well positioned to use her experience and knowledge to scale the program and give thousands of immigrants the skills and opportunities they need to thrive.

World Education supports our digital content development and technology tool adoption and customization. We partner with the Community College Consortium for Immigrant Education (CCCIE), a network of community college experts in immigrant education, who helps us build our instruction infrastructure and develop our curriculum portfolio. We work with RTI International, our independent program evaluator. Finally, we partner with community colleges where we draw highly qualified, accredited ESL instructors.

EAW is offered through a tiered pricing model based on the number of 30-student cohorts each client engages. While many of the program’s one-time technology costs have been accounted for, startup costs for new corporate clients include curriculum customization, reporting and technical support.

Over the next five years, as the program scales to new industries across the country, our financial model is predicated on revenue from corporate clients purchasing the service and private philanthropy. While we aim for the program to be self-sustaining, if not profit-generating, the next 2-3 years are crucial transition years in order to create a sustainable financial model that will help ensure EAW’s long term success.

We have created a financial model to project a “break even” point at approximately 9,000 students trained. 

In addition to general support grants, we have received the following program support grants:

• The JPB Foundation, $1 million/2 yrs, $200,000 of which goes toward the California campaign
• The James Irvine Foundation, $650,000/2 yrs

Corporations that have purchased the classes in the last 12 months are:

• Whole Foods $50,000

As a part of our campaign to train 6,000 LEP workers in California, we are recruiting business clients and Corporate and philanthropic funders to match the $650,000 seed money from the James Irvine Foundation, we need to raise another $450,000. If we cannot raise the necessary funds the campaign cannot move forward. Our initial fundraising efforts have been somewhat stalled by the pandemic and lead up to the presidential election. However, we do see an increased interest in investment into the foreign-born workforce.

Our program’s focus for 2021 is on the state of California. We are working on a revenue model proof of concept with the California project, and will scale up the program into a national model. Our start-up costs are estimated at $1.3 million which includes the costs for staffing up, technology upgrade and additional contextualization and customization. Once California is established, we anticipate expenses for expanding in other states, but these sunk cost expenses would be low.

Our mission and the overall premise of the Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US challenge are highly compatible. EAW serves immigrants, one of the most marginalized groups in the US. EAW provides our foreign-born workers with the skills necessary to thrive in their workplace and communities, as well as the opportunity for economic mobility and career advancement. Foreign-born workers make up large proportions of every essential work sector. They are 73% of agricultural workers, 29% of manufacturing workers, 24% of direct care workers, and 20% of transportation workers. It is clear that in these unprecedented times, it is imperative for immigrant workers to have the skills they need work and communicate effectively as well as follow enhanced safety procedures. This grant would allow us to scale our work and provide EAW services to dozens more employers and thousands of workers. It would enable us to hire staff and consultants to help us build out our instruction infrastructure, fine tune the technical elements, and provide top-notch help desk support. We will be able to expand our industry-specific curriculum portfolio to ensure that every LEP worker has access to contextualized English training that works for them. 

We are actively seeking philanthropic partnerships to help underwrite a portion of the program’s costs. We have sought introductions to new funding sources from our existing philanthropic and corporate partnerships.

We have a contract coordinator responsible for engaging new corporate partners interested in purchasing our training.  We also engage trade associations and chambers of commerce to spread the word to their respective memberships.

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