As the global economy reopens and demand for air travel increases, the airline industry faces pressure on multiple fronts. The need to recruit skilled workers in a short space of time is one of the main barriers to the recovery.
At a time when overheads are rising, how can HR managers find the most cost effective solutions to hire, train and retain flight crews and attendants?
Let’s explore this issue and look at some of the solutions.
One way to attract staff is to offer opportunities for learning and personal development. These should make a positive difference to candidates’ lives, such as helping them develop their English-language skills.
Unlike other skills developed at work, English can be used outside the workplace, for travel, personal development and to better enjoy books, music and movies. Therefore, offering training in English language skills can be a key way to attract quality applicants.
At the same time, English is a core skill for airline employees. It’s used on a daily basis with customers from around the world to deliver great customer service and to maintain safe operations.
The combination of daily practice, plus the opportunity to further improve their English can be a real advantage against other industries when recruiting talented staff.
Private tuition is expensive when scaled to large numbers of students. And group language classes can be impractical to timetable around various employees’ schedules.
A more cost effective solution is to use the latest technology to bring the benefits of private language tuition to large numbers of staff.
By using ELSA Speak as a flexible learning tool to develop employees’ speaking and listening skills, you can integrate language development into your operations. We offer a complete solution allowing airlines to improve the English of their staff with one simple yet powerful dashboard.
See the new ELSA dashboard in action!
It saves time, resources and the effort of manually managing your staff’s language training. Our innovative AI voice coach technology offers a powerful competitive advantage that over 300 global businesses are using to drive down costs, and raise productivity and performance.
Our model of developing English rests on three steps - Test, Train and Track. Each can be done more quickly and efficiently than the traditional way of using face-to-face classes and offer significant benefits in terms of performance and developing a culture of quality and learning in your business.
How do you assess someone’s ability to use English as part of their work in the airline industry? The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, or CEFR, is the de facto standard for assessing a candidate’s English language proficiency. It places learners on one of six levels, from beginners at A1 who can perform basic functions in a language but may often be misunderstood, to near native speakers at C2, who can communicate fluently without any misunderstanding.
In a global industry, where US English is the global standard for language, helping your staff reach near native speaker levels of English can add an extra shine to your customer service.
ELSA’s scale of English is aligned to the CEFR but at higher levels it adds robustness by factoring in elements such as pronunciation and intelligibility, which in an airline setting, with interfering sounds like engines, warning alarms and other customers speaking, may affect how staff are understood.
Our voice recognition technology listens to learners as they respond to spoken prompts in the app’s initial level test, and gives clear and actionable feedback to the learner on how they need to develop their sound formation in order to sound as near to a native speaker as they can be.
The ELSA Scale of English
The ELSA Scale of English gives you accurate and reliable estimates of a candidate’s level. For example - an airline employee, such as a member of the ground crew at level 2 (CEFR A1) on the ELSA scale can give basic instructions from a script to passengers and respond to simple and predictable requests, such as giving directions or instructing passengers to board.
An employee at level 6 (B2) can do more interactive tasks with passengers, such as making arrangements for a passenger with special needs to board a plane safely and conveniently.
Compare this testing approach to traditional language coaching, with employees sitting tests and being assessed by English teachers.
Administering large numbers of level tests is a significant time and cost investment. It takes time to develop, deliver and mark hundreds of tests. To speed up the process and lower costs, airlines can use our API to design a screening test according to their specific needs.
With a convenient dashboard which highlights your employees’ level of spoken English, you can safely assign tasks to their ability, and train them to develop into more advanced roles, should they wish.
You can start putting employees through the training system with tailored learning packages to focus on the areas that matter the most to them. You can also group employees together in the app, through competitive games and communities, to maintain engagement and motivation to learn.
Our iOS and Android apps offer five different types of activity to develop speaking skills:
ELSA’s voice recognition technology is constantly evaluating learners, so the more they use the app, the better it knows their strengths and areas for improvement. Even if your workforce has a range of different native languages, ELSA can cope and offer everyone a personalized learning path tailored to them.
As well as training, ELSA can also track progress. You can measure progress by employee, department or the whole company using ELSA easy-to-use dashboards, allowing you to know exactly how your organization’s skills are developing. Put simply, the higher the English levels in your company, the better your staff are able to serve your customers.
ELSA tests learners regularly, allowing you to decide whether their language skills are good enough to offer them a role with higher levels of responsibility. It is also easy to see how staff are progressing through the dashboard, and identify areas to improve their English.
ELSA can change the game and help candidates to a required level of English, and train them up at a very affordable cost. Research has shown that we can offer an 80% saving in training costs compared to traditional English training programs. With real-time tracking and analytics on the dashboard, 3 months of daily study can lead to a significant increase in confidence when speaking English, which can lead to higher staff retention and productivity in customer-facing roles, something that can be difficult to achieve