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You have just hired the international specialist you spent months looking for. The working language is English, the collaboration is going well, and on paper everything is sorted. Yet you see it happen in many organisations: a few years later that same person is gone. Not because the work disappointed...

Most teams in Dutch organisations speak decent English. Good enough for an email, a call with a foreign colleague, a presentation that just about lands. But between “decent” and “truly fluent” sits a grey zone that nobody measures, and that still costs time and money every week. This article is...

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes | Nicci Severens Sometimes you do not have six months. A new international role is around the corner, a foreign client is at the table, or a team suddenly has to meet in English next month. That is when you are not looking for a...

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Booking is one phone call. But what does your employee actually get after that? A behind-the-scenes look at the Summer Crash Course: five weeks of intensive language training. In our previous blog, why you book now and not in six weeks, we wrote about timing....

Summer is the best time of year to learn a language. Not because it sounds appealing, but because it actually works. Fewer meetings. Less deadline pressure. More headspace. Exactly the conditions under which people genuinely absorb and retain new skills. Not a rushed training day squeezed between two projects, but...

You have invested in language training. Your employees have started. So now what? At some point, someone asks the question: is this actually paying off? A director reviewing costs. A CFO asking about return on investment. Or you yourself, as an HR or L&D manager, needing to show that the...

Language training during the onboarding of expats is one of the most effective investments an HR professional can make, and one of the most underestimated. You found the best candidate. International talent, strong CV, enthusiastic during the interview. The first day goes well. And yet, a few months later, something...

Your organisation is growing internationally. New colleagues from abroad start full of motivation, but quickly run into an unexpected barrier: the language. Not just at work, but also in informal conversations at the coffee machine, in the hallways and during meetings that drift into Dutch. Language is the silent factor...

(practice example) The energy transition is one of the greatest social challenges of our time. To make it happen, tens of thousands of new professionals are needed. Network operators such as Alliander, Enexis and TenneT are looking for engineers and technicians who can help the Netherlands move  forward in a...

In many organisations, one attitude still prevails: Language skills? We’ll deal with that later. Even more discouraging is when someone finally finds the courage to admit they’re struggling with a second language — only to be met with a response like: “That’s not something to worry about right now.” But...