Allison Antalek

I've been in my field for 26 years now, and I just keep on adapting. I started out as a language teacher with a master's in translation, working in linguistics and translation, and with the whole shift and change in the AI world, I've had to shift quite a lot. My passion has always been languages and teaching. After teaching a few years here in America, I wanted to go to Europe so badly and live and work there, so I proposed to set up a subsidiary for an American company in Europe, in France. That's how I went over there in 2003, and I set up a business for them. I gained a lot of business know-how, and a year and a half later, I opened up my own company called Language Solutions. I offered tailored corporate training and seminars, which then led me to contacts with several German and British publishers. I ended up doing seminars for them, teacher training, and face-to-face teacher training materials, which I built, and I ended up publishing 17 books. Then the economic crisis happened in 2008, and I lost all of my clients. I moved to Berlin and worked as a global sales manager for Oxford University Press, and then British Council as well, and I ended up rolling out British Council's first virtual academy for Business English, which was a huge accomplishment for me. From there, I continued and opened up another business called Business English Guru in the 2010s, and that's when I started specializing in e-learning, specifically, and customized training and learning experiences for corporations worldwide. In 2019, unfortunately, due to an accident, I had to move back to the States, and I had to start over again, so I started up an LLC again here and gained several clients during COVID, which was a great plus for the training industry. I've been developing ever since. What makes me unique is that I'm not only an instructional designer, I'm also an e-learning developer, and 99% of instructional designers cannot design and develop. They can only write, and the flip side with the developers, they don't have the teaching and pedagogical expertise, and so I bring all of that to the table for my clients. I can do the work of three people. I try to bring everything I can onto the table and do everything to make sure that it is an amazing and engaging and sustainable and rewarding learning experience.