Needs+Analysis

**English to //do// your Business Vs English to //talk about// your business**
Tom Challenger


 * Background:** 6 groups of back office staff (administration) at a bank, administering shares and securities. Mixed levels, mixed departments and functions, some needed English to do their daily work, most not. Most just wanted 90 minutes away from their desks. For the people that needed technical banking terminoloy for their job, the vocab they needed was no problem - they had to use it everyday! But, some members of the groups couldn't deal effectively with calls that came into their department, but were actually to do with another department. So, their was some technical vocab which some of them needed to __//do//__ their job, and help their customers/partners get through to the right person. I quickly put together a "preformatted" sheet, to try and extract the relevant vocab to get people through to the right department. Here it is:



I then used the Oxford Business English Dictionary (the one that Mark showed us, which he used to help him write his '90 minute MBA') to help me understand and expand the lexis that this exercise produced and then designed some tasks around the relevant lexis.

Here is an example of a "glossary" for deparment "559" (they have very sexy deparment names at this bank!) I put together with the results of this questionnaire : So basically, its the terminology that they said customers and partners used on the phone when calling their department and that people in other departments would have to know in order for them to get through to the correct department.