Jon Glendinning

Background

About Jon Glendinning

The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning. It should produce not learned but learning people'. I became an English teacher as a way to earn a living whilst travelling. However, I quickly found an appetite for the classroom and that academic years made travelling rather more difficult that I had expected. The British Council opening its teaching centre in Prague in 1994 then gave me the colleagues and shared space to really develop my skills. I started to explore teaching business English and then management and discovered that models of business success and business behaviour were as interesting to me as language teaching. I moved into my first management role with three teachers and two classrooms in Ho Chi Minh City in I managed our corporate business in Cairo with some 70 clients and in the economic crash of 2003, was offered payment in kind (bags of cement). In 2004 I was Director Chiang Mai and the British Honorary Consul. Three years in Kiev expanded my portfolio to include Examinations and Teacher Training. In 2012 a move back to Vietnam allowed me to coach and coax a vibrant business into a truly profitable business and into my current regional role. The steepest learning curve so far with 10 countries, income of GBP 75m and influencing skills as the critical enabler. COVID then turned our world inside out and that is what I have been working with for the past 12 months. Not an uneventful career so far.