Business English Expertise: Does It Really Take 10,000 Hours?

Business English, English Training, Speaking Skills

July 4, 2024

It does not, and fortunately, Business English “expertise” needn’t be the goal.

I recall reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink with some pleasure.

I’ve also heard about the “10,000 hour rule” from another of his books, Outliers, which stipulates that to master a skill, one must work at it for 10,000 hours.

This rule does not appear to have been considered by ESL students in Thailand, and who could blame them? Ten thousand hours seems like an awfully long time.

I’ve been an English teacher here in Bangkok since 2011, and I have yet to be asked by any student about the validity of this number to achieve Business English expertise, or if there even is a number. But just to be sure, let’s run the numbers!

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Is 10,000 Hours a Long Time?

Business English training for Thai professionals in Bangkok is usually conducted on a “we’ll come to you” basis. We trainers visit companies at their facilities to teach their employees in their offices and conference rooms.

We usually visit them twice or thrice per week, after normal working hours, for 90- or 120-minute sessions. So, for our calculation, let’s use two-hour sessions twice per week – which equals four hours of class per week. #math

Of course, we implore our students to study English outside of the classroom, too. They should be reviewing their notes, practicing pronunciation, and actually using the language with fellow classmates, colleagues, and customers.

If the extracurricular activities add another hour per day, Monday through Friday, then the total time spent learning English would come to nine hours per week. (Let’s leave the weekends for relaxation.)

After rounding up from nine hours to 10 hours to make the numbers easy to calculate, we’re talking about 520 hours per year – or nearly 20 years to reach 10,000 hours.

So yeah, 10,000 hours is a long time in the context of learning English through a corporate training program!

The Good News

Fortunately, most Thai corporate professionals who are looking to improve their English communication skills are well beyond the “early days” of learning. So they aren’t starting from scratch.

This is because “English” is a standard course in almost every K-12 curriculum in the Land of Smiles, and a large percentage of Thais who go to university will receive even more ESL instruction.

Another thing that could be considered fortunate when it comes to employees trying to achieve Business English expertise is that “expertise” isn’t really necessary. What is necessary is for Thai employees in professional environments to develop English skills that allow them to communicate clearly & confidently in their place of work.

And the levels of clarity & confidence are subjective: An Events Coordinator at a 5-star deluxe in Phuket would need to speak with a certain level of sophistication that a Housekeeper would not, and ECSC Thailand accounts for that difference in the English training we provide.

So if Thai people have a solid foundation of English grammar, and mastery is not the goal – and therefore 10,000 hours is unnecessary – then how many hours are recommended?

The Right Amount of Business English Training

If not 10,000 hours, then how many? There are two possible answers:

It just depends.
It takes 90 hours.

It just depends because every learner is different. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s work with 90 hours.

The way ECSC Thailand provides training is in 15-hour “modules.” These modules consist of 10 1.5-hour lessons and cover many Business English environments (that is, environments in which Business English is necessary).

This includes our General Business English modules and our English for Specific Department (ESD) modules, which again are 15 hours each.

We help our clients’ HR / Training Departments choose the modules that are best for their employees, and determine how many modules would be most beneficial. So, we can see that an employee would reach 90 hours of training by participating in six modules. #math!

Please contact Ajarn Don to find out more about how ECSC Thailand can help your employees improve their English communication skills with our modules that emphasize Vocabulary & Pronunciation, not grammar.