What English level does your team actually need?
The question usually arrives with a budget attached. Someone in the company has said that "the team needs English", finance wants a number, and the honest answer is that the number depends on which team and which fifteen minutes of their working week actually happen in English. A warehouse supervisor and an account manager need different things, and paying for the same programme for both is the most common way to spend a training budget without seeing a result.
Levels at work, role by role
The CEFR scale describes what a person can do, not how many years they studied. Read the row that matches the work, not the row that sounds impressive.
| Level | Roles that work at it | What it unlocks at work |
|---|---|---|
| A2 | Production lines, warehouse, security, drivers on domestic routes | Standard instructions, safety briefings, short handover notes |
| B1 | Service desks, hospitality, logistics coordinators, junior support | Everyday conversation with customers, routine correspondence, following a briefing |
| B2 | Engineering, IT, finance, marketing, project management | Meetings without an interpreter, presentations, client calls, working documentation |
| C1 | Sales leads, legal, medical, senior management | Negotiation, tone and nuance, complex documents, speaking for the company |
Two lines on that table are worth reading twice. The step from B1 to B2 is where a person stops needing someone else in the room, which is why it changes the most in a working process. The step from B2 to C1 is where language stops being about understanding and starts being about influence, and it is the longest step of the four. A full description of each band is on our English levels page, and the timelines behind those steps are on how long it takes to learn English.
Why “B2 for everyone” is the expensive answer
Levelling a whole company up to B2 sounds tidy on a slide and rarely survives contact with the work. The people who need B2 are the ones whose day contains a meeting, a client or a document in English. For everyone else the same money buys a level they will not use, and an unused level slides back within a year or two.
The cheaper decision is almost always narrower: name the scenario that is costing you something, then find the people inside it. A stalled supplier thread. A demo where the engineer goes quiet. An escalation call handed to the one person who "speaks English well". Each of those is a small group with a specific task, and that is what corporate English courses are scoped around: groups formed by level, a programme built on your own processes, and reporting a manager can actually read.
What actually gets tested at work
Employers rarely test English as a subject. They test it in the form the work uses: a call with a client, a stand-up, a written reply to a complaint. In hiring, the written filter comes first, because a CV and a covering letter are read before anyone books a call, and a conversation follows. Inside a company the sequence is reversed: people are hired for the skill and the language gap only surfaces later, in the meeting where the specialist stops explaining and starts nodding.
This matters for how you assess a team. A grammar test measures what someone recognises. Work measures what they produce under time pressure, with an audience, and with a colleague waiting for the answer. Those two numbers can differ by a whole band on the same person.
Where self-assessment misleads a manager
Three patterns come up repeatedly when a team fills in a form about its own English.
- Understanding is mistaken for speaking. Watching a series without subtitles and answering a client's follow-up question are different skills, and only the second one appears in your processes.
- School and university records are still being used. Without regular practice a level drifts down by roughly a band over a few years, so a certificate from 2015 describes a person who no longer exists.
- Levels are rounded up on paper. Nobody wants to write B1 next to their name in a company file, and the rounding is discovered in the first difficult call rather than in the spreadsheet.
None of this is dishonesty. Self-assessment is simply the wrong instrument: people compare themselves with their colleagues rather than with the task.
An hour that shows where the team really stands
You do not need a testing budget to get an honest picture. Three tasks, twenty minutes per person, and no preparation announced in advance:
- Two minutes on their own work. Ask someone to explain what they do and what they are working on now. Fluency on familiar ground is the floor of their level, not the ceiling.
- Ten minutes on one email. A realistic message from their inbox: a delay, a refusal, a request for clarification. Writing shows structure and register far more clearly than speech does.
- One unexpected question. Interrupt the prepared part and ask something adjacent. Whether the person can leave the script is the difference between B1 and B2, and it never shows in a rehearsed answer.
Record the sessions and compare them with the same three tasks six months later, which is the whole method behind measuring English progress at work. If you want a scale reference alongside your own notes, an online level test gives each person a CEFR starting point in a few minutes.
Common questions from managers
What to do this week
- Write down the three situations where English currently costs the company time, and name the people inside them
- Run the three-task hour with those people and keep the recordings as your baseline
- Decide the target level per role from the table above, not per department
- If the gap is individual rather than organisational, a business English course for one person is usually the faster route