When Julie Tolzman started the hunt for a new job a year ago, her main concern wasn't that she wasn’t qualified for a new position — but that she would lose the ability to communicate with coworkers in one of her native tongues, Tagalog.
At a new company, Tolzman knew she’d have to speak more English. She was willing to put in the work, but she wasn’t as confident in her future employer’s willingness to work with her. When she interviewed with the team at countertop plant Cambria, she started to find that confidence.
“When I applied here, I told [my supervisor] that I know my English is not very good,” says Tolzman, who moved to the U.S. six years ago from the Philippines. “I know how to construct sentences, but it's just the way I speak — it’s a little different. And he said, ‘OK, we can work with that if that's what you are so worried about.’”
Within a few weeks, Tolzman was trained and onboarded as a QA inspector at the company’s headquarters in Le Sueur, Minnesota, and now works as the quality control lead. Her training included a series of one-hour long language lessons sponsored by language upskilling platform EnGen, built directly into her schedule. The goal of these lessons is to get Tolzman and other non-native English speakers to a ninth-grade reading and comprehension level.
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Cambria has been offering these kinds of courses to its workers for six years, and now has four fully licensed ESL instructors teaching 50 classes to 123 employees. It’s helped the business hire from an expanded talent pool, and for its workers, has made the process of learning English less isolating. With Cambria’s current set up, Tolzman can leave her shift to spend up to an hour each day studying in a private space.
“I did not know that Cambria was offering English classes until I got here,” Tolzman says, adding that she was surprised these lessons happened during her scheduled working hours. “I asked my boss, ‘Do I need to come here when I'm not working?’ And he said, ‘No, [we do it] together.’”
Stories like Tolzman’s are hardly uncommon, but they don’t always end with a new job that both compliments the worker’s skill and invests in setting them up for future successes.
One out of every 10 working-age adults in the U.S. has limited English-language proficiency, according to a 2019 report by the National Immigration Forum. That
Immigrant workers deliver a massive boost to individual businesses and the U.S. economy: their economic contributions account for nearly $2 trillion of total U.S. GDP, according to a recent report from global nonprofit JFF. They have higher retention rates than the labor force as a whole, and are the only talent pool growing at a pace to offset the impending retirement of baby boomers.
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“We have a huge population of immigrants and refugees who are here, who are working, who are keeping our economy going — who kept our economy going during COVID as frontline workers — and they are often blocked from promotion and advancement because they don't have English skills,” says Katie Brown, founder of EnGen, the language upskilling platform utilized by Cambria. “There's a huge focus on upskilling and re-skilling and helping incumbent workers get the jobs of the future. But we just leave the ones who don't have English skills out of those conversations.”
The
“There are a lot of programs in the community of adult education that would be really happy to partner with companies, but I think companies are not aware that these programs exist,” says Kamille Kolar, English language and leadership development specialist at Cambria. “Or they don't really realize that they can provide the space and time for the employees to be there.”
There are more than two million immigrants in the United States who are underemployed or unemployed, according to the New American Research Fund, and the current ESL methods being utilized by companies are only serving approximately 4% of the English learner population.
“The solution is not just going to be adding capacity to community colleges and education centers,” Brown says. “It's going to be for employers to think about English as a benefit.”
This has led many immigrants and English-language learners to create their own solutions. When Alex Lashkow moved to the U.S. from Russia six years ago, he came with marketing experience and expertise, but struggled to find a firm willing to capitalize on his skills and overlook (or help him improve) his less-than-perfect English.
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So Lashkow created Linguix, an AI platform available to employers to help
“When I started to create content in English I realized that spell check solutions that were available weren’t good for me,” Lashkow says. “As a non-native speaker, when I use these tools there is no actual progress — it’s always just clicking in and accepting the edits for these mistakes, only to make them again and again.”
Linguix uses artificial intelligence to help immigrant workers communicate better in writing by employing English email templates and autocorrect that checks for tone and figures of speech in addition to grammar. For a base fee, employers can add it as a browser extension to company-sponsored devices so they can help employees learn the language without taking time away from work.
Offering
”In my experience most of the time [immigrants] don't even know they have the qualifications to do the job because of their English,” Tolzman says. “And it's hard for them to [get better] at speaking English if nobody is going to teach it the right way.”
