Meet Guerda: EnGen Learner, Aspiring Teacher
“The bottom line is that before EnGen, I wasn’t comfortable speaking in front of a crowd. But now I am so confident. I don’t need to know all of the words in the dictionary to have a conversation.”
Originally from Haiti, Guerda Garner is using EnGen to learn career-aligned English vocabulary – and that’s helping her move ahead, both at her job as an Amazon Associate and towards her long-term career goal of becoming a teacher.
Her growing confidence also helped her feel more like herself when speaking English. Guerda is a self-described ‘people person,’ delivering light-hearted one-liners as she shares how she met her husband – a Pennsylvania native who was working as a missionary in Haiti – and ended up in the U.S.
“I saw him, this wonderful man, and then he opened his mouth – he had this accent, I realized ‘he speaks English!’ But love doesn’t have a language,” she recalls. “Before I arrived in Pittsburgh, we used to talk on the phone. He would tell me, ‘I’m going to keep you warm.’ I thought he was talking about love, but it turns out he was talking about the weather. Both the snow and the language were big adjustments for me.”
Since 2022, EnGen has provided English upskilling to thousands of Amazon employees like Guerda via Amazon’s Career Choice Program, an employee educational benefit that offers pathways to English skills, career training, and college credit. Included among EnGen’s 125-plus course offerings is “Introduction to E-Commerce Warehousing,” which has provided Guerda both the vocabulary and skills to excel at work.
“Everything I learned has helped me because it is about my work, the concrete things we use – labeling, packing, and more – it was all waiting for me, and I was able to learn on my own. And now I am comfortable because of that course,” Guerda explained. “I love EnGen – I love the fact that I can study on my own, in my own space, on my own time. I can just open the computer and use the platform and just study.”
Time is a new commodity for Guerda. She’s spent the last two decades focused on raising her three children, including fraternal twins.
“In 2003, I landed in a place where I didn’t know anyone or anything – I only knew my husband. All these years I stayed home and took care of my children. I knew I could do more, but the sacrifice was worth it: Our oldest child is already in college and the twins will graduate high school this May and head to college too,” she says. “So now I’m going to have all the time in the world.”
Guerda is putting that time to good use: She’s completed 960 activities on the EnGen platform, including 18 units, 26 online group classes, and 9 online private classes. Her English proficiency has progressed rapidly, moving from an intermediate to a high intermediate level in less than four months. Guerda is among the 92% of EnGen learners who demonstrated an increase in English proficiency as a result of using the platform; 95% reported increased confidence in using English, while 87% achieved a career or social goal, like a pay raise or promotion.
Guerda’s next goal is to earn her high school diploma – with support from both Amazon Career Choice and EnGen’s “English for the GED'' course – and then earn her Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) certificate, focusing on tutoring children and young language learners.
“EnGen has inspired me to become an ESL teacher - I can understand how [other English learners] can feel,” Guerda says. “People may be shy to talk because they don’t want to make a mistake, but we learn from our mistakes. Don’t be shy; open up your mouth and you will get there. And if somebody doesn’t pat your back, pat your own back. We have goals to achieve.”
EnGen partners with Fortune 500 companies, regional employers, educational institutions and government agencies to serve tens of thousands of adult English learners like Guerda. Learn how it can work for your organization: https://getengen.com/demo