On a wintry Warwickshire morning, 77 Year 8 students from Queen Elizabeth School and Sports College in Atherstone warmed up by flexing their international marketing muscles.

The students took part in a Business Language Champions event aimed at showing them how important language and cultural skills are to businesses selling overseas.

Matthew Finch from Stratford-based PMD Magnetics visited the school on 13 January 2010 to share his experiences of learning languages and explain how these skills have enabled him to liaise confidently with international customers.

Matthew then set students the task of marketing the Jetflash – a USB memory stick currently sold by PMD Magnetics– to customers in France, Germany and Spain, through creating posters in the relevant languages.

Each group had to organise themselves as a ‘mini’ company, with a name and appointed Export Sales Manager, who reported back at the end of the session with a short presentation to explain their choices of language, colour and images.

The morning was a resounding success and Matthew presented the winning team with a selection of prizes including CD-Rs and PMD Magnetics pens.

Cornelia Smith, Language Teacher at Queen Elizabeth who co-organised the event, was delighted with the workshop, she said:
“I would like to thank the RLN very much for organising this event.  Matthew did a brilliant job and his presentation was pitched at the right level, giving pupils very interesting examples and they worked hard competing for the prizes which Matthew brought to school.”

This event was organised by the Regional Language Network West Midlands – for more information on the BLC programme in the region please visit the RLN West Midlands website.

Pictured: Business Language Champion, Matthew Finch, with Queen Elizabeth students (back row from left to right) Charlotte Kingston, Holly-Jane Gilliver and Keiran Bates, (middle row from left to right) Lewis Wrigley, Lauren Farmer, Bethany Taylor and Lauren Thompson and (front row) Shannon Sheedy.