Apollo looks ahead

Khalid Muhmood, chairman of Apollo  tells VIR’s Song Ngoc about his strategy in the coming years.

How do you evaluate Apollo’s performance in 2010 when the Vietnamese economy was in recovery mode?

With more than 17 years operating in Vietnam, Apollo is proud of its contribution to Vietnam’s education and training sector. In 2010, Apollo had lots of exciting milestones benefiting both our students and the community.

We have introduced a number of initiatives such as guaranteed results where people can study English with us and if they don’t pass the end of course exam can retake the course as many times as they need at no extra charge. We also have a strong fun and learning programme to encourage our students to use their English outside the classroom, which plays a valuable role in improving confidence.

We continue to make English enjoyable through our long-term partnership programs with VTV: Golden Bell and Road to Olympia as well as with Zing and Yan TV with the program of Apollo English Idol Contest.

Then there are our charity program where we support a number of charities by providing free of charge language training. We have worked with thousands of Vietnamese students to help them learn and improve not just their English but also their confidence. Our business English arm is going from strength to strength.

Companies today have more specific needs such as business writing, report writing, telephone skills and presentation skills. Our work in 2010 has been recognised with a number of awards. Apollo has received recognition from our current students who voted for us in Golden Dragon award 2010  from other organisations, like VTV where we received a VTV award in 2010.

One of Vietnam’s breakthroughs in its 2011-2020 development strategy is stable improvement of human resources. How will this translate into opportunities and challenges for Apollo?

Improving the quality of human resources is a challenge in any country. Even in a developed country like Singapore you can constantly read about the desire of the Singaporean government to improve the quality of its labour force.  In Vietnam the challenge is much larger because the population is a lot bigger and there are the funding constraints.

The opportunity is there for Apollo to contribute to Vietnam’s human resource improvement by improving the quality of English language teaching and learning throughout the country. The challenge is how to do it to the scale required especially in areas outside the major cities where funding is often an issue.

And your action plans?

The way we are dealing with the opportunities and challenges is by making sure that we have Apollo centres in all of Vietnam’s key locations. We are also making very strong progress in our teacher training courses where we cooperate with organisations like Cambridge and Pearson to bring teacher training know-how to teachers who work not only in the key cities but also the less developed provinces of Vietnam.