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How do I teach business English online?

Business English is adult ESL for the working-professional context — the language of meetings, emails, presentations, negotiations, and industry-specific vocabulary, taught to career professionals who need English to do their job. It sits alongside general conversational English, IELTS/TOEFL exam prep, and academic English as one of the four main adult ESL specialties, and it commands the highest hourly rates of any English-teaching specialty because your students are billing their own hours at a professional rate and their employers often sponsor the training. The workflow is genuinely different from teaching kids — no parents in the loop, self-paying (or corporate-sponsored) adults, lesson content that's about doing a specific professional thing rather than covering a curriculum, and the strongest tool is a shared browser you can drop into a real LinkedIn profile, a real business article, or the student's own presentation slides together, rather than a face-on-a-tile video call. This page covers who your students actually are, what the lessons cover, how to price and structure the specialty, and the tool decisions that matter (and don't) for adult professional clients.

Who business English students actually are

The label is broad; the working segments a solo tutor sees are narrow. In roughly the order they show up in a working practice:

  • Mid-career professionals whose employer has assigned English coaching — a manager whose promotion to a regional role requires better meeting English, an engineer moving from a domestic role into an international team, a sales lead whose accounts are now cross-border. The employer is often paying (through the employee or as a corporate account); the student cares about visible progress on specific job tasks.
  • Adults relocating for work — an expat moving to the UK / US / Canada / Australia whose written English is already strong but whose spoken register is off (too formal / too textbook / no small-talk grammar), or a professional going the other direction (English-speaker moving to a non-English office needing to operate in English with local colleagues).
  • Job-seekers targeting international employers — CV / résumé polishing, interview preparation, LinkedIn presence, cover letter drafting. The engagement is often short (four to twelve lessons) around a specific application window; a good outcome converts them to conversational-English maintenance afterward.
  • Professionals preparing for a business-English proficiency exam — most commonly Cambridge Linguaskill Business (the successor to BULATS) or ETS's TOEIC (the exam that dominates East Asian corporate hiring and promotion). Note that the Cambridge Business Certificates — B1 Business Preliminary, B2 Business Vantage and C1 Business Higher, the former BEC range — were retired outside mainland China after 2023 and now run in China only, roughly once a year; Cambridge points everyone else at Linguaskill or the general B1 Preliminary / B2 First / C1 Advanced range. If a student names "BEC", check where they're sitting it before you build a course around it. These overlap with the exam-prep specialty — see how to teach exam prep online for the exam-prep-specific workflow — but the vocabulary and register are business-English, not academic-English.
  • Independent professionals working in English — consultants, contractors, translators, small-business owners whose clients are foreign. Often ad-hoc, package-billed, and hard to keep on a steady weekly cadence.

What's common across all five: they're adults, they're paying (or their employer is), they have concrete professional goals, and they measure progress against those goals rather than against a curriculum. A single client can move across two or three of these segments as their career changes; you don't need to specialise below "business English" to run a working practice.

What the lessons actually cover

The scope is wider than "conversation with business vocabulary." A working business-English tutor keeps lessons across roughly nine content areas, rotated by the student's current job priority:

  • Meetings. Both running one (setting the agenda, moving through it, closing) and participating in one (interrupting politely, disagreeing without escalating, asking for clarification without losing face). Register is the game — "I disagree" vs "I see it slightly differently" carry the same information but land differently in a boardroom.
  • Emails and written communication. Register scale (formal / neutral / informal), openings and closings, how to hedge, how to soften a "no", how to escalate without burning a bridge, how to reply to a complaint. Increasingly also Slack / Teams / WhatsApp channel tone, which is a different register from external email.
  • Presentations. Structure (opening / signposting / closing), pace, dealing with Q&A, handling interruptions, the language of visuals ("as you can see on this slide…"). Advanced students work on executive presence — the ability to sound decisive in a language they didn't grow up in.
  • Negotiations. Softening language, mitigation, hedging, conditionals ("we'd be able to do that if…"), holding ground without escalating, closing a deal in writing after a call. Overlaps meetings but is a distinct sub-skill.
  • Interviews. STAR-style behavioural answers, technical interview English (for tech roles), executive-level "walk me through your background" scripts, second-round panel English. Short, intense engagement; measurable outcome the client remembers.
  • Small talk and networking. The bit textbook English never quite teaches — conference small-talk, cocktail-hour English, elevator conversation, the "how was your weekend" call opener before the actual meeting starts. High-value for professionals who feel competent on task English and stuck on relationship English.
  • Industry-specific vocabulary. Finance English (P&L, EBITDA, runway, valuations), tech English (deploys, roadmaps, sprints, SLAs), legal English (indemnity, arbitration, force majeure), medical English (case notes, handovers, patient-facing register). You don't need to be a subject-matter expert — you need to be honest about which vocabulary you can drill and where the student needs their own domain reference.
  • Cross-cultural communication. The high-context / low-context mismatch, direct vs indirect feedback conventions, differences in how disagreement is signalled across cultures — anything a student needs to work effectively with colleagues from a different English-speaking region or with non-English-speaking teams that operate in English. This is not linguistics; it's a small vocabulary of moves that professionals notice.
  • Accent and clarity coaching. Not "reduce your accent" (that framing has aged badly) but making the student's English clearer under load — slowed pace, stressed content words, sentence-level rhythm, tricky phoneme drills where they materially affect comprehensibility on a busy call.

Any given weekly lesson covers one or two of these — students don't buy nine simultaneously. What separates a working business-English tutor from a general adult-ESL tutor is the ability to bring the right one to the front for the week's job priority.

How much to charge for business English

Business English is the premium band of the ESL specialty. As covered in the sibling how much should I charge for online tutoring? answer, credentialed business-English coaches working with mid-career professionals bill $80-$150/hour, with corporate accounts (billed to the employer) sitting higher than self-paying individuals. Tutors moving into the specialty without a specialist credential start nearer the established-generalist band — $35-$60/hour on the same page's ladder — and work up as they build a portfolio of before/after case studies and testimonials; an executive-coaching credential or a specific industry background is what moves you to the top of the specialist range. See how much can I earn teaching English online? for how these bands slot into an indie tutor's overall earnings picture.

Two structural notes on business-English pricing that don't apply to teaching kids:

  • Package-first is the shape. Adults are worse at committing to a fixed weekly slot than parents booking for a child; a paid package of 8, 12, or 20 hours locks the commitment and smooths cash flow. See how to structure lesson packages for the discount tiers and expiry rules that hold up in practice; business-English packages are usually shorter (8-12 lessons) and higher-priced per lesson than K-12 packages.
  • Corporate accounts have different mechanics. If the employer is paying, the invoice needs an itemised description (dates, hours, focus areas), payment terms are often net-30 or net-60 rather than the up-front pattern private clients accept, and the initial engagement usually goes through a procurement or HR review. You'll want to raise your rate relative to individual private clients to cover the extra admin and the slower payment cycle. Check your local rules on invoicing corporate clients from a self-employed practice; the details vary.

Structure of a business English lesson

A working shape that survives across the specialty:

  • Lesson lead is the student's actual week. "What did you have to write or say in English this week that was hard?" is a better opener than a coursebook page. Whatever they name — a bad meeting, a stuck email draft, a slide they need to present next Tuesday — that's the lesson. If they can't name anything, fall back to a coursebook module (see the curriculum section below), but the real material is always better.
  • Practice on real professional material, not sanitised textbook material. The student's own slide deck, their own email draft, the LinkedIn profile of the person they're about to interview, a real article from Reuters / FT / Bloomberg / HBR relevant to their industry, a Google Docs draft the two of you edit live. The reason this pays off for business English specifically is that adults recognise the difference between "practising English" and "getting better at my job in English" — the second is what they're buying.
  • Feedback on register, not just grammar. Correcting "we was thinking" to "we were thinking" is remedial-level correction. Correcting "we thought maybe we should do it that way" to either "we'd suggest doing it that way" (external client email) or "let's do it that way" (internal team Slack) is business-English correction. Most students haven't been taught the register scale; making it explicit — formal / neutral / informal — is one of the most under-taught things a business-English tutor can add.
  • Record speaking practice for review. This is the single highest-value workflow for adult professional clients. Run a mock presentation, a mock interview panel, a mock difficult-conversation with a manager — recording on — and send the student the recording afterward with two specific things to listen for ("count every 'basically'"; "listen to your part two answer and mark every pause longer than two seconds"). Adults who hear themselves speak English for the first time make more progress in a week than in a month of "your fluency is good; work on pace." Cloud lesson recording is a Koala Platinum feature — see how do I record online tutoring lessons? for the storage / consent / retention shape.
  • Homework is short and job-adjacent. Adults skip lessons rather than do long homework — see the adult treatment in how do I set homework for online tutoring students?. Twenty minutes of "polish the email we drafted together and send it; forward me the reply" beats an hour of coursebook exercises.
  • Close each lesson with a written mini-recap. Three lines — what we worked on, one phrase to remember, one thing to try in a real work situation this week. Adults value the artefact; it also earns its keep on renewal decisions. Koala Platinum's auto-generated class notes produce a draft after each lesson; you edit and send in a minute, same workflow the keep-parents-renewing spoke describes for kids' progress updates.

Curriculum sources — what actually works

Business-English curriculum is a real category with several published series in current print. The four names most working tutors evaluate first are Market Leader (Pearson, unit-per-industry-topic structure at each CEFR level), Business Result (Oxford, function-and-communication-skill-first structure), In Company (Macmillan, closer to the "in-company training" register), and Business Partner (Pearson, competency-mapped for the corporate-training market). None of them is the right answer for every student; each has a coherent shape and there's no shortage of debate about which coursebook maps best to which student type. For students preparing for Linguaskill Business or ETS's TOEIC, the exam-prep publishers (Cambridge University Press, Oxford, ETS) publish materials mapped to the exact test. Be careful buying second-hand BEC preparation material for anyone outside mainland China — that exam range was retired after 2023, so the papers are practice material now, not a syllabus.

The stronger curriculum answer for business English specifically is a two-source stack: a coursebook as the scaffold for absolute-beginners-to-lower-intermediate students who don't yet have a job-specific vocabulary reference, and the student's own work — real emails, real slide decks, real meeting transcripts, real Slack threads, real industry articles — as the primary material for anyone at B2 and above. The published-curriculum-vs-DIY tradeoff is the same one the sibling published curriculum vs DIY answer describes for kids; the ratio flips harder toward real material for adult professionals because the student is buying job outcomes.

Free supplementary sources every working business-English tutor uses: LinkedIn Learning short courses (the business-writing and presentation-skills modules are decent for homework), the BBC Learning English "For Work" content, the Voice of America Business English archive, and industry publications the student already reads (FT / Bloomberg for finance clients, HBR for management clients, Reuters for a general audience). Don't over-source; three good tabs beat a Notion doc of thirty.

What tools actually matter for business English

The platform decisions look different from teaching kids. Adults do not need — and in a professional-client setting, actively don't want — a gamification layer, an avatar customiser, or a Gems economy. What they do need is a shared surface where the two of you can operate on real professional material together in real time, plus recording, plus a way to book across their travel schedule.

Broken out by workflow, in the order they earn their keep:

  • A shared browser (cobrowser) is the single biggest tool for adult professional practice. Screen share is a picture — you talk, the student watches, and only the host acts. A cobrowser is a real webpage the two of you both control: you both have a cursor, you both click, you both type. For business English specifically, this is what makes "let's practise" real. You can walk through the student's own LinkedIn profile and edit it live. You can open the Reuters article they read this morning and drill unfamiliar vocabulary in place. You can drop into a Google Doc email draft together and negotiate the register line by line. You can open a Bloomberg news brief and rehearse a five-minute "brief the meeting" summary from it. None of that is possible in a video-call-plus-screen-share shape — the student has to do the thing to get better at it, and in a screen share they can only watch. This is where the cobrowser earns more per lesson for business English than for any other adult specialty. See what is a cobrowser? for the mechanic.
  • An interactive whiteboard that accepts PDF, PowerPoint, and image upload. The student's real slide deck goes on the board and you annotate it together. Their draft email goes up as an image and you mark the register issues in colour. A Linguaskill Business practice paper goes up and you work through it. Koala Go ships this on Koala Pro (Upload PDFs & PowerPoints is a Pro-tier feature); on Free you have the whiteboard but not the file-upload surface, which is the thing that matters for business English.
  • Lesson recording. The recording workflow described above — mock presentation, mock interview, mock difficult conversation, send the clip with two specific listen-fors — is the single highest-per-hour piece of pedagogy for adult professionals. Koala Go's cloud recording is a Koala Platinum feature; the sibling how do I record online tutoring lessons? covers storage, retention, consent, and the honest hedge (get explicit consent in writing; storage retention lives with your practice, not with the tool).
  • Scheduling that respects their calendar. Business-English students travel, reschedule, cross time zones, and prefer to book their own slots rather than DM you to negotiate one. Koala Go's integrated scheduling ships on Koala Pro (a teacher-and-parent portal where you set weekly availability and clients book their own slots via an invite link — see how do I schedule online tutoring lessons?) and Scheduling Plus (30/45/60-minute class lengths, recurring bookings, enforced booking-policy controls) sits on Koala Platinum.
  • Worldwide invoicing. If your clients are on different currencies, or if you take a corporate account paying in Euros while the individual professional pays in USD, having invoicing inside the classroom saves the Stripe / PayPal / Wise reconciliation dance. Koala Go's built-in invoicing is 4.5% on Free, 3.5% on Pro, 0% on Platinum, and accepts payment worldwide (including WeChat Pay in mainland China, which matters if you teach professionals inside the Great Firewall — see teaching English to students in mainland China for that connectivity picture).

Things adult professionals genuinely do not need in the platform: a customisable avatar, a 3D world to walk around in, a rewards currency, a shared game space. Koala Go's Playground is one of the things young learners love most about the product (see the gamified virtual classroom explainer), and it's exactly the layer you'd leave switched off for a business-English lesson — the classroom mode with the whiteboard, cobrowser, and recording is what earns its keep for this audience.

Common failure modes to avoid

  • Turning business English into "conversation with vocabulary." A one-hour weekly chat about work topics is not business-English coaching; it's paid friendship. The lesson has to change something specific in how the student writes or speaks in a specific professional context. Every lesson should end with a written mini-recap the student can point back to.
  • Ignoring register. Most intermediate students speak in a middle-register default that reads as slightly-off across the range they actually operate in — too casual for a board deck, too formal for a Slack channel. Making the register scale explicit (formal / neutral / informal, plus who's in the audience) is the single biggest under-taught move in the specialty.
  • Not recording speaking practice. The mock-presentation / mock-interview recording workflow is the highest-ROI thing you can do with an adult professional client, and most tutors skip it because "we didn't record last week either." Set it up on lesson two and default to it.
  • Using kid-ESL materials on adults. A B2 professional adult who's handed a "colour the picture and say the word" activity will not come back. Even at lower CEFR levels (A2 / B1 business), the materials should look like adult reference material.
  • Confusing IELTS Academic with business English. They're different domains. IELTS Academic vocabulary is academic; business-English vocabulary is corporate. A student prepping for an IELTS Academic 7.0 to get a UK university admission is not the same student prepping for a promotion to regional manager. Route them to teach exam prep online if it's IELTS/TOEFL prep and you're not sure which specialty they need.
  • Not asking about the student's actual workplace context. "What industry are you in, what does a typical week look like, who do you write English to and who do you speak English with" is the first-lesson diagnostic and most tutors skip half of it. The answer shapes the next twelve weeks of lessons.
  • Overpromising on industry-specific vocabulary you don't have. "I'll teach you legal English" is a claim the client can test in a lesson. Be honest about which industry vocabulary you can drill from your own working knowledge (finance, tech, medical, legal, marketing, HR, engineering) and which you'd need the student to supply reference material for. That's the honest offer.
  • Not tightening cancellation policy for corporate clients. Individual professionals cancel less than parents-of-kids do; corporate-account students often more, because their calendar is not theirs. Enforce your minimum-cancellation-notice window from lesson one (see how do I handle student no-shows for the mechanics).

Where Koala Go fits (and where it doesn't) for business English

Koala Go (the virtual classroom we build) is honestly well-shaped for the business-English workflow described above — specifically the cobrowser, the PDF/PowerPoint whiteboard upload, the cloud recording, the built-in scheduling, and the worldwide invoicing all map to workflows a working business-English tutor uses every week. The classroom mode (whiteboard, video, chat, cobrowser) is what you'd have open in front of a business-English client; the Playground is what you'd leave switched off. Free is enough to try a real lesson with a real student end-to-end (up to 4 students per session, limited cobrowser, up to 3 activities); Koala Pro ($25.99/mo monthly, $21.99/mo annual) unlocks the file-upload whiteboard, the unlimited cobrowser, and integrated scheduling; Koala Platinum ($49.99/mo monthly, $39.99/mo annual) adds cloud recording (the piece that matters most for adult speaking-practice review), Scheduling Plus, auto-generated class notes, and zero-fee invoicing.

Honest limits worth naming: iPad works but is rougher than desktop — for a business-English tutor whose lessons live in shared documents, a laptop with a mouse is the more forgiving side; mainland-China connectivity is served by our Hong Kong proxy but is a moving target, so if you have professional clients inside the Great Firewall test the connection on a real lesson before selling a package; the whiteboard is honest for annotation and drawing but stops short of a full graphing or equation editor (business English rarely needs those, but it's an honest hedge); and business English is not the primary Koala Go segment — the survey we run on our own users skews young-learner and SEN, not adult professional. The 81% "very disappointed if I could no longer use Koala Go" figure on our 2026 product/market fit survey (the "very disappointed" threshold conventionally taken to indicate strong product/market fit is 40%, so that number is well past the bar) reflects that mix; we haven't published a segment-cut for business-English tutors specifically.

Where Koala Go is not the right pick: a pure-conversation adult client on a clean 1-on-1 video call, where the lesson is mostly talking and there's no shared material to annotate or professional context to walk through — a video call plus a shared PDF is often enough for that shape, and the tools mentioned across our sibling pages (Google Meet, Whereby, Zoom) do that job. The moment the lesson gets richer than "talk about your week" — a slide deck to critique, an email draft to negotiate, a mock presentation to record, a LinkedIn profile to edit together — a purpose-built classroom starts to earn its keep. If you'd like an honest read on whether Koala Go fits your specific business-English practice — client mix, industry, region, current stack — write to koala@teachwithkoala.com with a sentence about your practice. We're a small team and we read everything.

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