The project business_mail addresses the needs of suppliers/sales personnel of small enterprises (SE) having or wishing to establish business contacts with foreign contractors/clients. Staff in charge of business communication in SEs do not usually have adequate skills in terms of practical knowledge of a foreign language or the intercultural competence needed to establish and maintain business contacts. Very few of these firms can afford to employ professional import/export staff, and in most cases these tasks are carried out  by personnel who have not been properly trained. Language schools, in the main, offer only general foreign language courses.

 

Tailor-made courses for businesses are few, expensive and usually inaccessible to the staff of small enterprises. The courses organized at work places are usually run for larger enterprises. A busy work schedule usually excludes their staff from participation in on-site courses at language schools which require regular attendance over a long period of time.

 

The business_mail project involving English teachers, communication skills trainers and e-learning experts aims to develop appropriate measures to remedy  the above situation by:

 

-  setting up an e-learning platform for the design and delivery of business communication skills
-   designing a set of on-line modules for use the fields required
-   delivering a pilot on-line course in business English and intercultural communication (ICC) for use by the staff of SEs
-   evaluating the efficiency of training in different cultural and business contexts

 

The final product of the project will be a validated on-line course in business English and ICC covering actual communication problems encountered by SEs involved in import/ export. The results of the project will be applied by each of the partners and widely disseminated throughout European lifelong learning programmes.