Do Czech People Speak English?

In Prague it's always been pretty good--well, at least for the time I've been here. I rarely even hear Czech when I'm visiting the main tourist areas of Prague.

In the smaller cities it's improving rapidly.   I live in a small rural town(population 30 000) near the Slovak border and I own what is one of the biggest language schools in my region; so I've had a bird's eye view of how English skills have developed over the last decade.

Overall, I'd estimate the amount of people at an intermediate level or higher in small town(not village) Czech Republic to be at about 30 percent.

Professionals/White collar workers:

In general, the middle class tends to have a real eagerness to learn English: their jobs demand it, they want to speak on holidays and so on.

• In my small rural town, many professionals do speak English--most I would say in fact. Their level ranges from pre-intermediate to very advanced. However...
• People with a technical or engineering background tend to be on the lower end of this spectrum; they have greater problems because language learning is not prioritized at the technical engingeering universities. 

This is a real shame as the Czechs have traditionally displayed a real strength in engineering and technical matters that could easily be exported to the world and I would argue that the lack of English skills in technicians and engineers is handicapping the Czech image abroad, especially in Western countries.

AS a result I've had a fair few clients sign up for expensive individual courses after graduating as many of the international companies that the Czech Republic's economy is based on require English for their technical positions.

• Economists, salespeople, lawyers, doctors, bankers and top executives nearly all speak very good English; many of them at a pretty advanced level.
• IT professionals(and there are many in the Czech Republic) speak English quite well, but tend to have problems with appropriacy and social niceties and even sometimes hypothetical situations...though I think that might be about their own 'geek'  personalities and the Czech Republic's cultural valuing of the practical and the physical.

AS for young people, again, it's a mixed bag.

Students

• Gymnazium students in particular have improved in leaps and bounds with most of them achieving B2 and a fair few achieving C1 or even C2 level on the Common European Framework.
• Students in more vocational or technical schools tend to have a much lower level of English, with an average of A2 level, despite a few bright stars. Again, the system seems to de-prioritize English for these students just as it does in universities.
• University students nearly always speak English pretty well, again, with the exception of the technical students mentioned above.

In theory, all students taking the Maturita exams(roughly equivalent to Britains O-levels) should be at B1 level ; but some of them do not take the language exam; and I can assure that a minority of 19-20 year olds from the vocational-technical schools really are B1 level.

Blue collar people

(caveat: it gets harder for me to accurately assess the abilities of most blue-collar abilities because I speak Czech and deal with them in Czech and they don't tend to take English classes(lack of money and lack of interest being the primary reasons, I would say)

• common factory workers, shop assistants, mechanics and the like usually do not speak English with a few exceptions.
• However, It's not uncommon for a waiter or waitress or other service personnel to speak a little English nowadays, exceptions being perhaps in some smaller villages.

Pensioners, etc:

Older people, even highly educated ones, tend to not speak English, as has been pointed out by others on this thread.

Most of them do understand Russian and many of them might get by in German. In my area, there are some Polish speakers as well, mainly because of proximity to the Polish border and growing up with some Polish TV channels. Of course, nearly everybody speaks, or rather understands Slovak, although some children have a resistance towards it at first.