The beginnings of the Gnosis i-learning methodology were quite different to what we are witnessing now. We have been providers of business writing courses since 1994. At the time, these were traditional training courses delivered to a base of clients in Europe, which included some of the Big Four audit companies.

We, like any other traditional training course provider, faced the usual training problems:

Having a native English-speaking teacher in a classroom of just a few students proved too costly for our clients. Inevitably, participants did not attend every day of the course because of work commitments. Moreover, we found that because a course had to be conducted in as short a time span as possible (so as not to distract participants from work), participants had very little time to digest and apply the writing skills they had learnt to their everyday work.

Cooperating with big language training companies, which have a good reputation, also proved unnecessarily complicated. Their assigned trainers would not work on case studies relevant to participants' work; they delivered their own programme, which was entirely unconnected to Business English, thus not providing the personal attention participants needed.

We had to find a way to harness the scarce professional resources available to deliver truly effective business English courses:

• We have kept GnosisLearning’s standards throughout our i-learning curriculum by emphasising the case-study-based programme, which offers real professional writing skills and tools directly relevant to the workplace.
• We have been hugely successful in recruiting some of the best English tutors in the field and making them more accessible to our clients through our state-of-the-art business writing courses.