The article deals with the issue of motivating university teaching staff to learn English as an essential condition foradapting to new professional requirements resulting from the necessity of working in international research and education. Ural Federal University’s positive experience in implementing a large-scale programme of teaching English to its employees and in establishing different mechanisms for managing their motivation to learn English is described.The optimum combination of different factors, such as eliminating demotivators and limitations (time, place and financial constraints), providing high-quality teaching, creating favourable learning conditions, using additional external financial incentives and taking into account the specific characteristics of adult learners enabled UrFU to create, maintain and evenenhanceits teachers’ motivation for learning English. The survey carried out among the programmeparticipants revealed that internal motivators play a more important role for adult learners in comparison with external positive reinforcement.