You’re the HR manager at a Dublin-based corporate. Your new hire has everything you need. Well, nearly everything. All they lack is the conversational English they’ll need for you to get the best out of them. Which is a pity – because that vital project starts in two weeks’ time. You need to talk to Salvatore Fanara and Rosanna Fiorenza of Travelling Languages. But first, romance. He was an engineer from southern Sicily. She was a banker from Turin. It was 2006. Salvatore: We met in Turin a few weeks before we moved to Ireland. Rosanna: He told me that he was planning to go somewhere to improve his English. Salvatore: We were looking to do something different, to make a big change. Rosanna: I decided: look, I’ll quit my job, we’ll pack and we’ll go. Salvatore: London, Dublin, Edinburgh…? In the end we just packed the car and we drove from Turin to Dublin. Rosanna: I worked in banks for another 7 years here. But I‘d had enough of banking, finance, I wanted to change, I wanted to do something else. So we brainstormed. Salvatore: I remember thinking that if I wanted to scale up my own working life I really needed to get up to speed properly from a language perspective with someone who’s not Italian. The starting point was when we realized that a lot of people weren’t satisfied in terms of the results they were getting from traditional language programmes: we’d identified a gap in the market. Rosanna: We came up with the idea for Travelling Languages in 2011 and I finally quit my job in 2013.
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