Investing in growth with language trainingEF has been working with Swedbank for over a decade to provide language training services to exactly suit their business needs.

Swedbank’s need: Swedbank began as Sweden’s first savings bank in 1820, but now they are an international banking group spread out across various branches in Sweden and the Baltics. To facilitate international cooperation, the company made the decision in 2011 to con-duct their Credit Committee meetings in English. This created an immediate need for language training, as many of Swedbank’s employees did not have an adequate English proficiency to at-tend such meetings.

EF’s solution: By combining online courses, im-mersion courses abroad and in-company train-ing, EF was able to provide a solution to suit all of Swedbank’s requirements. After the decision was made to conduct the Credit Committee meetings in English, EF worked with Swedbank to create a series of Banking and Finance-specific private lessons that focused on the exact vocabulary that employees needed for their presentations. EF is now training around 150

students using this content in tailored private courses.

The results: The Banking and Finance-specific private lessons have been hugely popular with Swedbank employees, who were initially ap-prehensive about giving their presentations in English. In fact, before the introduction of the training, the switch to English for the Credit Committee meetings was the most hotly-de-bated topic on Swedbank’s intranet forums. Indeed, there was some initial resistance among employees to studying English at all. However, after training began with EF, employees were much more enthusiastic and did not need to be encouraged to study. Many students have even progressed faster than expected, taking full ad-vantage of EF’s Online School, virtual teacher-led conversation classes and the 24 x 7 flexibility that it represents. Now they have every opportu-

nity to feel prepared and confident to speak in front of an important group of individuals in English.

Case study – Swedbank

“It´s a great privilege to get banking and finance-specific private lessons. The EF program has contributed to great improvement

in my profession and also in terms of personal development”Camilla Karlsson, Client Executive, Midcorp.Swedbank is a leading Nordic-Baltic banking group, with home markets in Sweden, Estonia, Latvia

and Lithuania. The group is also present in other Nordic countries, the U.S., China, Russia and Ukraine. They provide full banking services for over 9.5 million private and 600,000 corporate customers.

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