How did you find your way to ESL, when did you start working and what was your first position?
It was early 2005 when I was contacted by a relative to undertake a research study to evaluate the potentiality for a Swiss education agency to open a branch in Colombia. Late November that year, I travelled to Switzerland to present the results to ESL – Séjours Linguistiques’ directors, but the decision made at that time was that the project needed to be put on hold and that the company would rather open a branch in the Republic of Panama first. However, there was an opportunity for me to stay in the company, do a one-year internship in the logistics department and learn French while I was improving my English. I decided to seize that chance: my journey through the ESL Education world had officially begun.
What’s your current position at ESL and how did you get there, which development did you follow?
My current role at ESL Education is Latin America Area Manager. I got here through an 11-year career path that started from the very basics, dispatching brochures for our European students and taking care of facilities and resources; and from there, up through the Marketing and Content departments, taking care of content production for our websites and blogs in Spanish, doing also some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the purest initial community management of our first social networks for the Spanish-speaking world. Then, in 2008, when I came back to Latin America, I took care of the production, printing and export of our ESL Latin America brochures from Colombia to Panama. Later on in 2009 – 2010, I undertook some commercial back-up missions for our office in Panama and by 2011 I was appointed to launch our first office in Colombia, Bogota, and build the first team. In 2012 I became Latin America Regional Manager and took on my hands the development of our ESL Panama office from that point on. Today, my mission is focused on strengthening the ESL Education position in our different markets in Latin America as a whole.
What do you like about working at ESL and what do you think has been key to ESL at that times success in the last 20 years?
What I like the most about working at ESL Education is the kind of professional action that you get. Managing a region for ESL is a high-performance sport that involves strong teamwork, international liaison, business strategy and a strong travel discipline. However, the former wouldn’t be possible at all without the most important ingredient of ESL Education’s success: its people. Our team, with different backgrounds, a very ample diversity and the strongest conviction and determination is, has been and will always be key to ESL Education’s developments and enterprises.
Javier Perdomo
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