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First held in 2010, the day coincides with William Shakespeare’s birthday and celebrates English as one of six official UN languages. To mark the occasion, we spoke to IELTS expert Chris Cavey about how the British Council’s online IELTS course helped 2.2 million students learn English last year, enabling them to live, work or study…

Buy an upgrade or paid course using PayPal Previously, you could only buy an upgrade or paid course with a credit or debit card. In 2017, we introduced the ability to pay in US Dollars, Euros and Australian Dollars as well as British Pounds – but this still meant paying by card. After a lot…

Over the decades, the fashion industry (said to be valued at $3 trillion globally) has repeatedly been criticised for a careless approach to ethics and the environment. Put simply, when you buy cheap clothes, someone else pays extra. That someone? Often the producer, or the environment. Or both. And yet, when shopping, it can be…

This week is Learning at Work week in the UK. But making sure you have the right professional skills is important wherever you’re based. So how good are your soft skills? These aren’t the specialist skills required in your role that you might already have (for example coding or writing) these are skills that are…

Building self-confidence is the key to Leadership. When in sixth grade, my shy, soft-spoken, niece Katie approached me and asked me the best way how to learn to speak and write Japanese to add captions to her Japanese action cartoon characters that she liked to draw. I told her to take and learn martial arts.…

No se pueden pedirle peras al olmoyou cannot ask an elm for pears In short: you cannot ask the impossible. Si mi abuela tuviera ruedas seria una bicicleta If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle This means if things happened differently, they would be different, so it’s silly to even suggest it. Pájaro que…

Networking is a fundamental part of building a career, but it can be a daunting prospect introducing yourself to strangers. Yet the challenge is worth overcoming; successful working relationships can help you move companies, grow new skills or even bring in new business. To help you on your way, we’ve got 5 top tips to…

Bringing history to life on screen isn’t always easy, especially with something as visceral as food and feasting. To help people experience dining at court in way that’s truly vivid we used ‘historical interpreters’ who appear in a cameo role each week. So, what does it take to transform into a historic figure? We thought…

In a world that is always changing, ongoing learning is no longer an option – it’s a necessity. Or as Joyce Russell, a career coach, put it: “learning is not just a nice thing to do – it is essential for staying on top of things” (Washington Post). Keeping up your learning can help you…

Just 16 years into the 21st century seven new vaccines have already been developed; the success of campaigns to eradicate diseases such as smallpox and polio seems likely; and new drugs are able to massively reduce your chance of getting HIV. It seems that new healthcare advances are regularly in the headlines. But as far as we’ve come, healthcare still…