Storytelling as a Key Competence: My Experience in the Positive Influence at Work Program

Yuliia Fernos

 Teaching Business English to master’s students whose first language is not English presents a unique challenge. The course cannot be purely academic; it must prepare students for real professional situations such as job interviews, presentations, and workplace communication. However, for many teachers ‒ including myself ‒ this creates a dilemma. While we are trained in language pedagogy, we may not have extensive personal experience in corporate environments. This raises an important question: how can we ensure that what we teach is truly relevant to the business world our students are about to enter?

For me, this gap between the classroom and reality became increasingly uncomfortable. I wanted my Business English course to be more than a set of useful phrases or textbook role-plays. I wanted my students to feel prepared to talk about themselves, their experience, and their goals in a way that would sound natural and convincing to real employers. That professional need led me to the online course Positive Influence at Work, organized by TESOL-Ukraine and Sumy State University (Ukraine).

The program, led by Mark Powell, an author and internationally recognized Business English trainer who works directly with managers, executives, and corporate teams to develop professional communication skills, offered something I was missing: direct insight into how communication works in real business contexts. The course was designed specifically for teachers of EFL, ESP, and EMI who wish to develop their understanding of professional communication. It consisted of ten thematic modules, including Negotiation, Confrontation, Presence, Vocal Intelligence, Rhetoric, and Storytelling. All sessions were highly practical and based on real business situations. Rather than focusing on linguistic forms, the program emphasized communicative strategies, psychological impact, and professional presence.

For me as a teacher, this practitioner-based perspective was particularly valuable. It offered access to authentic communicative practices from the business world, allowing me to bridge the gap between academic language teaching and professional reality.

Among all course components, storytelling emerged as the most powerful. Mark Powell devoted three full sessions to this topic, highlighting its central role in professional life. In professional life, people rarely communicate in isolated sentences. They tell stories about who they are, what they have done, and why they made certain choices. This happens during job interviews, in meetings, in networking conversations, and in leadership situations. Employers do not just want to hear what someone can do; they want to understand how that person thinks, reacts to challenges, and grows.

This is exactly where many Business English students struggle. Even when their grammar and vocabulary are good, their answers often sound flat or disconnected. They list qualifications, describe tasks, but fail to create a clear picture of themselves as professionals. What they lack is not language, but a narrative structure that helps them connect their experiences into a meaningful story.

One particularly memorable story was shared by Powell himself. He described a woman who attended one of his training sessions. Given her age and confidence, he assumed she had long been a teacher. However, she revealed that she had only recently entered the profession. Before that, she had worked as a judge but resigned because she opposed the death penalty in her state. She then returned to Harvard to study, entered politics, and became a senator. Mark reacted with surprise, asking, “You were a judge and a senator, and now you are a teacher?” The way he phrased the question and his intonation implied that he viewed teaching as lower in status, but the woman replied, “I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. Teaching is one of the noblest professions.”

This story illustrated two essential features of effective storytelling: movement and meaning. It showed how a life can be framed as a journey from one point to another, and how professional identity is constructed through choices and values rather than job titles alone. It also served as a powerful metaphor for teachers themselves, reminding us of the impact we have on others.

One of the most useful tools introduced in the course was the ABT model: And – But – Therefore. According to this framework, a story begins with an opening statement, develops through the use of “and,” reaches tension or contrast through “but,” and culminates in meaning through “therefore.” The “but” is what creates interest ‒ it is the moment when something changes or becomes difficult.

This simple structure works extremely well in professional contexts. In job interviews, for instance, candidates are frequently asked about challenges, failures, or pivotal moments. The ABT model helps them frame these moments in a way that shows growth rather than weakness.

I integrated storytelling techniques into my master’s level Business English course over the course of a semester. The students were preparing for their first professional interviews and were highly motivated to improve their self-presentation skills.

We began with simple reflective tasks, such as The six-word memoir and The 24-word autobiography, which required students to reflect on what truly defines them. We then moved on to activities like Creating lifelines, where students mapped important moments in their lives, and At a crossroads, which asked them to reflect on the choices that had brought them to their current field of study. All of these activities were introduced by Mark during the course.

As students became more comfortable, we began to apply the ABT structure to interview questions and short presentations. Instead of answering in lists, they were encouraged to tell short, meaningful stories about their experiences.

The results were noticeable quite quickly. Students who had previously given very formal, generic answers began to speak more personally and with greater confidence. They started to identify turning points in their lives and explain how those moments shaped their goals.

During the final interview-style presentations, many students naturally used the ABT structure. One student, for example, described a failed internship as the “but” that made her rethink her career plans and choose a different professional direction. This made her story more engaging and more convincing than a simple list of skills.

Beyond language development, these activities helped students develop important soft skills, including self-awareness, confidence, and a professional identity. For learners about to enter the job market, this was just as valuable as learning new vocabulary.

The Positive Influence at Work program showed me that authenticity in Business English does not come from copying corporate jargon. It comes from giving students tools to express who they are and how they have grown. Storytelling provided exactly that.

As teachers, we may not all have corporate backgrounds, but we can still prepare students for professional communication if we have access to methods grounded in real business practice. By teaching students how to tell their own stories, we help them find their voice in English ‒ and that may be one of the most powerful things we can do for them.

My sincere thanks go to Mark Powell for supporting Ukrainian teachers during these challenging times and for keeping professional development alive, even under the most difficult circumstances.

Author bio:

Yuliia Fernos, PhD in Philology, specializes in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Business English. She is currently a faculty member at Uman National University (Ukraine), where she teaches future professionals to communicate effectively in academic and professional contexts. She has served as a facilitator of two international MOOCs, including Creating and Implementing Online Courses and TESOL Methodology, supporting teachers in developing strong pedagogical and digital competencies for online and blended learning environments.

Her research interests include language teaching, cross-cultural communication, and curriculum and materials design.

Email: fernosyulia@gmail.com