International Language Academy of Canada

Jul 26, 2022

Redeem now Mariana Gomes started taking English lessons with the hope of increasing her salary. She says the lessons helped her land a job at Amazon Prime Video for triple her previous salary. Here's her career story, as told to Madeline Renbarger. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mariana Gomes, a Rio de Janeiro resident who landed a marketing position at Amazon Prime Video and tripled her previous salary after taking English lessons. It has been edited for length and clarity. Before I first applied to work at Amazon, my English was very poor. In 2019, I was working as a sales software manager at a national media company in Brazil called Globo when my boss left her job for a role at Amazon. I always thought that I would stay at Globo and not look for any other work opportunities, because I hated studying English. But when my boss left Globo for Amazon, it became clear that I could have a chance to work there, too. I wanted to be prepared for any future interviews at Amazon, so I decided to quit my full-time job and sign up for a language-exchange program at the International Language Academy of Canada to learn English. I lived in Vancouver for five months to study business and marketing in English, and it was the first time I had fun learning English. It clicked for me that the difference between a traditional English course and an exchange was the environment. When I was in a classroom setting before, it felt like a fake environment to learn, given that I was in Brazil. When you're learning your native language as a child, it's immersive, and that's what the exchange felt like to me. Then the pandemic hit in March 2020, and I had to return to Brazil. At the time, I was still waiting to hear about an opportunity at Amazon from my old boss. I didn't want to lose any progress on my English, so I searched online for ways I could continue taking lessons through immersive conversations remotely. I thought to myself, I need to face this problem head-on and find a way to keep using English in my daily routine. I tried a number of different online programs for a few months, which included online lessons from my exchange program in Canada. They offered me a discount, but they were still pretty expensive, so I had to stop after two months. Next, I signed up for the Fluency Breakthrough Challenge , a set of online lessons from a successful YouTube coach who would pair you up for daily conversations with people all around the world. After this program ended, I didn't know how I could keep talking with native speakers anymore. I talked to a friend in September and told her about my problem and that I was trying everything. She told me about an English-language-learning app, Cambly , and I signed up to take three lessons per week for one hour each. I was super shy at the beginning. I was nervous to open my camera and turn on my microphone and speak with someone that I didn't know in a language I'm not that good at. I thought, OK, maybe this will be a little bit awkward. But as I took my lessons, I realized that learning with Cambly was much more like my day-to-day conversations about my life than a formal class. With peer-learning apps like Cambly, you are having a conversation with another person; you don't learn from a book or focus on formal grammar. After a month, I went into my interview with Amazon, in September 2020. I landed the job, and now I make more than three times more than I did at my last company. Now I feel that I can really speak English and work anywhere. I don't have the same obstacles in my career now that I can speak English more clearly. Instead of feeling that I can only work in Brazil, I've started considering opportunities in Miami, or another country. I feel more confident speaking with a hiring manager or with members of another team at Amazon. I think the effect is a globalization for me and my career. I feel that I can really talk and go anywhere. Two years ago I was crying about my English, and now I'm giving an interview in English! Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know. Subscribe to push notifications