Spanish teacher schools Minnesota’s biggest companies in 200 languages

When Ed Rosheim began teaching community college Spanish classes to employees from Minnesota companies such as Target, 3M and General Mills, he noticed something: Many weren’t learning anything they could really apply to their work.

“They weren’t learning job-specific or company-specific lingo,” Rosheim said. “They were learning how to order a margarita on the beach in Mexico, stuff like that. And there was just so much grammar.”

Having identified this niche market gap, Rosheim founded Workplace Languages in 1998 to serve the region’s Fortune 500 companies and beyond. Based in River Falls, Wis., the company offers group and one-on-one classes in 200 languages to factory workers and executives alike, with classes lasting usually eight weeks.

Through the years, the 58-year-old Woodbury resident went from interviewing prospective tutors in hotel lobbies to scoring billion-dollar clients that helped his business survive the pandemic.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, he talks about what it’s like in his shoes.

Some of my first gigs were teaching casino housekeeping staff English, second and third shift, and I just loved it. But God, I’d work there late, then the next morning, I would be teaching Spanish to supervisors at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Eagan. This went on for a few years, but I couldn’t take everything.

I did start hiring teachers here locally. But we weren’t posting on Indeed or anything like that. It was different. I was posting in the Star Tribune and different things like that. And it was really difficult because you couldn’t really describe the job requirements without shelling out a ton of money.

Slowly but surely, we got into translations. Then later, multilingual voiceovers or audio. Then even later, over-the-phone interpretation.

I’m kind of a people pleaser, and I hate letting people down.

When a client isn’t happy, I do everything I can to make it right. We can get a new teacher. We can start over. We can offer you some free one-on-one tutoring opportunities to catch the students up before they enter the class again, if they’ve dropped out. So when it doesn’t go well, I just feel that I haven’t done a good job of educating them and setting realistic expectations.

When I was starting out, I was teaching this 12-week English class to these folks who were very limited in English. During the orientation kickoff session, I was telling these plant managers and supervisors about the class. A plant manager stood up, and he said, “Isn’t 12 weeks a little long to learn English?”

I have learned to kind of educate our clients better up front and tell them what the training is and what it isn’t.

I was really scared. At the time, we’d had a lot of clients, but not really a big, big client. Then L’Oréal came along.

Whenever I see someone reaching out to me, and their email signature says intern, I think, “This is going to be an uphill battle.” But this intern at L’Oréal, she really did her research. She said, “Man, you guys come on-site, accommodate our scheduling needs and customize the curriculum.” She had read through everything that we had, then she set up a meeting with the vice presidents.

They had me jump through all the hoops, the metrics, the hard data. I had to produce a return on investment. I was grilled. But after we landed L’Oréal, we started getting other billion-dollar companies, people reaching out from overseas. It was pretty cool.

I still want to help individuals. I see individuals that are very smart. They’re very hardworking, but they haven’t had the opportunity, a lot of times, to progress or be promoted because of their lack of English.

I also want to give people an opportunity to really connect. At the end of our ESL classes, students get a chance to explain how learning English helped them at work and at home. They record themselves for a one-minute video. We have a ton of these. And they’ll say stuff like, “It’s helped me get promoted” or “This is the first time I could read a bedtime story to my daughter.”

Hussein Abulamzi is a freelance writer based in St. Paul. His email is husseinabulamzi@gmail.com.