We know the expression. But imagine for a second an actual group of people trying to move a real mountain. Do you see their energy, their power? “To move mountains” is a common English idiom, which means performing miracles, or doing the impossible. But is it so impossible? Not when you remember your company’s greatest asset: its team. When you align and celebrate them, anything is possible. At least, that’s how Eucom moves mountains.
The past few months forced us to improve all our skills and services. During that journey, we remembered just how exceptional people are. They are the ones who help us fulfill our mission to create impactful experiences for our partners.
One example of bringing our team together began last May. We launched a monthly reading group focused on personal development, called “Chance to Learn.” Five months later, it continues to be a success. Another example: “Travel Webinars.” Here our community members travel together to major cities, but virtually.
Regarding our business, which shines forth from our values, we have: Agile Learning, Accelerate Learning, and Language Assessments. These programs blend technology with human touch. Luckily, because our people are aligned and celebrated, they can help others improve themselves. Be it our assessment team creating stress-free environments for our candidates, or our trainer team motivating students.
Look, we don’t know the future. But we do see the almost unmovable goal ahead. Let’s make sure our people feel passionate about their jobs, so they will continue to move mountains.
Adela Viezure – Digital Learning Specialist & Business Developer
a. Name and position
My name is Adela Viezure and I am Digital Learning Specialist & Business Developer for EUCOM.
b. What exactly are you doing in your current role (and how did you start)?
I am currently in charge of developing digitalized language programs, widening our portfolio of clients, and finding new directions for development. My journey in EUCOM started in 2016 when I began working as a Senior Corporate English trainer. Afterwards, in 2018, I became a Digital Learning Specialist and Business Developer and continued to develop and grow within the company. It has been quite a ride, and I am sure there are many more challenges to come…
c. What are the activities that bring you great joy?
Interacting with people, whether it is my colleagues or our partners, I enjoy so much working together with them towards growing our partnership and finding the best ways to develop together
d. What challenges have you faced so far?
I think most of the challenges come from the times that we are experiencing, everything is changing so fast, and you always have to be ahead of the curve, to constantly change, adapt and improve in order to provide the best solutions, to help yourself and your company grow.
e. Tell us about the most unique experience/project implemented in your current position.
Wow, there are so many things I could say here, but I will speak about our Agile Learning program that we launched in 2019 in an amazing event and that we have continued to develop ever since. It is the perfect blend between technology and human interaction that has proven to be the most successful program for learning a foreign language. But of course, when I think of a unique experience, I will always remember those weeks following March 12th when we were all so united and eager to work as a team in order to adapt and find the best direction for our company.
f. When you explain to your parents/family what you do at work, how would you do it?
I always tell them that I work for a company that helps people learn, and become a better version of themselves, and that my main purpose is to find the best solutions that match people’s needs and expectations in terms of learning a foreign language 😊
g. What do you consider to be trends in your domain? Please list 3.
There are a lot of language trends, especially now that most of the activities are online, but the three that I always have in mind are: Social Learning, Customized Learning and Educative Gamification.
h. What are you doing to ensure you continue to grow and develop in the pioneering work?
What comes to my mind here is the Kaizen effect, the Japanese word for continuous improvement – Get 1% better each day, if you focus on improving something about yourself, your activity each day, you can grow and develop in the pioneering work. As Benjamin Franklin said: “Little strokes fell great oaks” – although something might seem impossible, if you break it down in small parts and take one step at a time, you will succeed.
Alexandra Oprea – Trainer Success Specialist
a. Name and position
Hi! I am Alexandra Oprea and I am a Trainer Success Specialist with Eucom Business Language.
b. What exactly are you doing in your current role (and how did you start)?
I started out as an English and Romanian Language Trainer, in 2013, and three years later I joined the head office team as a Talent Development Specialist. As a Trainer Success Specialist, I still do all of the above, but I am happy to be able to contribute more to the “big picture”, that of high-quality training experiences delivered by our trainers. For example, I am involved in developing the concept of our training programmes, assessing the quality of our sessions and promoting our training experiences.
c. What are the activities that bring you great joy?
Anything that has to do with our wonderful team of trainers, be it welcoming a new member to our team, sharing an idea for an activity that fellow trainers may find useful and suitable for their trainees, discussing ways to make learning more interactive, or finding a way to meet everybody online and exchange opinions on their challenges, accomplishments, and plans for more successful training experiences.
d. What challenges have you faced so far?
The challenge and the achievement of 2020 has been transferring all of our services online. The head office team and the extended team of trainers joined forces and moved everything online so smoothly, it was incredible – from choosing the best online meeting platform for each group of trainees, to using online resources and instruments, to making sure nothing is lost in terms of interaction, progress and the joy of learning together. Going online has inspired us to get even closer to our trainers and trainees, to establish online training quality criteria and implement a new way of obtaining feedback.
e. Tell us about the most unique experience/project implemented in your current position.
Building our “Train the Trainers” programme has been a project in itself. We started with a yearly programme, similar to an online summer school, then moved on to monthly face-to-face sessions with groups of 10-15 trainers, each on a different topic, and then to monthly one-to-one professional development meetings. As our team of trainers now consists in training specialists, with an average 5 years’ teaching experience, our in-house training culture has become one of sharing ideas, discussing challenges, finding solutions together, suggesting and reviewing authentic materials etc. We have come a long way and I am extremely proud of my colleagues – and eager to go even further alongside them.
f. When you explain to your parents/family what you do at work, how would you do it?
I work with an extraordinary team of language trainers, whose partner I am in creating and delivering amazing training experiences to their trainees.
g. What do you consider to be trends in your domain? Please list 3.
Making use of everything that the digital world has to offer is probably the most visible trend right now and I am happy to see that the training market has responded well. Our Agile Learning and Accelerate Learning programmes are living proof that we can combine digital solutions with human interaction and make considerably more progress.
Equally important, in my opinion, is expanding the learning experience to the workplace. Our trainees need language skills for work now more than ever, and these skills no longer involve simply being able to ask questions or use the correct tense, but also active listening, critical thinking, interacting with others naturally, communicating successfully with partners from other cultures – soft skills that go beyond the coursebook and into real life communication.
A third trend is a constant principle that we go by in our activity – personalized training. We believe that our trainees learn more efficiently if they benefit from a custom-made programme, that starts with assessing their language level by a professional assessor and building the right training strategy according to everyone’s learning needs and goals, and goes on with adapting the pace, constantly offering and receiving feedback, reviewing set objectives, and celebrating success.
h. What are you doing to ensure you continue to grow and develop in the pioneering work?
Research is paramount, but so is sharing our discoveries, otherwise it wouldn’t go further that my notebook. In our field, we need to be constantly up to date, and this enables us to use the latest training techniques and permanently improve the quality of our training services. We do research both individually and in a team, as part of our Chance to Learn – Read.Share.Repeat programme, where we read a professional development book every month, then meet to discuss what applies in our activity. Our conclusions reach our entire team of language trainers and assessors, and I hope they are an inspiration to create bigger and better things for our clients.
Iván Brave – Language Assessment Architect
a. Name and position
My name is Iván Brave and I am the Language Assessment Architect at Eucom.
b. What exactly are you doing in your current role (and how did you start)?
My job consists of three things: quality assurance, client support, and project management for new initiatives. Because we assess in over 30 languages, with a team of over 50 assessors living in and around Europe, executing tens of thousands of tasks every year, it can be quite a lot to handle! In fact, this is my first managerial role at a company, ever, not to mention my first corporate job. My start came last year, in the summer of 2019, when I moved to Bucharest, from New York, to live with my wife. Eucom was the first company to take a chance on me, during a rather hectic transitional period in my life. So, I am forever grateful to the leadership here, which I express through loyalty, enthusiasm, and results (as we like to say here!).
c. What are the activities that bring you great joy?
Joy, like real joy, really depends. Sometimes I enjoy putting on a loud Drum&Bass playlist on Youtube, entering lines of data for a new test. Other times I enjoy keeping in contact with our many partners around Europe or with our assessment team, via the phone, since it is our company’s unspoken rule, as well as my pleasure, to ensure everyone in our community is satisfied, doing well, or just plain happy. But what I most enjoy, has to be developing special projects in collaboration with our talented colleagues. We stick together, to stay relevant in the market, giving me a sense of comradery, I haven’t experienced anywhere else.
d. What challenges have you faced so far?
Sometimes projects fall through, they’re abandoned, or the initial enthusiasm fades away. It can be very frustrating to put in hours on a project, to make endless calls, align all the right players, only to see a prospect go away. I guess, in other words, the biggest challenge I’ve faced here so far is putting myself forward, be it ideas or effort, but to continue moving forward even when the effort produced little or undesired results.
e. Tell us about the most unique experience/project implemented in your current position.
Everyone remembers their first business trip abroad. Mine was in representing Eucom during a Language Assessment Conference in Ljubljana. It was an incredible opportunity to network with other professionals. Of course, the tours and the workshops were extremely helpful, giving me new insights, renewed energy, and a reinvigorated passion for an industry that was still new to me at the time. I flew back to Bucharest totally excited and ready.
f. When you explain to your parents/family what you do at work, how would you do it?
When I speak to family over the phone, I’m almost bursting with boyish excitement to tell them what cool things we’re up to at Eucom. I tell them, “I’m managing a team of over 50 language professionals!” They reply, “Oh, language? Of course, classic Ivan . . .” so I add, for emphasis, “Yes, classic me, and it’s for the number one language solutions company in Romania!” It’s a lot of fun, and pride-inducing, if that wasn’t obvious.
g. What do you consider to be trends in your domain? Please list 3.
Trends, whether fad or future, comes down to these three: 1) Artificial Intelligent scoring for oral and written assessments. 2) Academies and universities breaking into the Private Business Sector, offering affordable, brand-recognized language assessments. And 3) shared services companies bidding against one another to incorporate the market’s best of the best language assessment service.
h. What are you doing to ensure you continue to grow and develop in the pioneering work?
There are so many things on our plate, as far as assessments: offering B2C services, going VoIP for our call team, building integrated skills tests, attending the next language assessor conference, or even continuing to climb the stairs of excellence through quality and personal service . . . Maybe you meant this? Or maybe you mean what am I doing to grow and develop personally? Our company hosts monthly book readings, quarterly workshops in many key areas of business, and, last but not least . . . benefiting from Romanian Language Classes myself! If you go into a store and the employee there doesn’t use the product, what do you think? I can say, personally, româna mea s-a îmbunătaţit mult, mult, mult, de când am început cursuri cu Eucom – spune-mi, unde altundeva voi găsi un nivel ca acesta? Cu siguranţă, doar aici. And yes I, an American, wrote that.