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Why Are Foreign Languages Such an Important Asset When Recruiting?

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Why Are Foreign Languages Such an Important Asset When Recruiting?

I’m Anna, a French and Spanish graduate and I’ve recently joined the Internal Communications recruitment and executive search team at VMA GROUP. Your first question might be ‘so, do you use your languages in your job?’. The quick and easy answer is ‘no, not yet’ because I work predominantly with UK-based clients and candidates - but I often come across great individuals with a range of language skills and this always stands out to me.

Being able to work in such a supportive environment at VMA GROUP is allowing me to shape and grow my own career and do things that are so important to me – like writing this post, about why I think foreign language skills are all-too-often overlooked in the UK job market. As a languages graduate, questions like ‘so, will you be a teacher or a translator?’ sound all too familiar… and much to my delight and the frustration of some, I can now turn round and say ‘neither’!

‘Everyone speaks English!’ – we’ve all heard it before, right? Yes, it’s true that around 1.5 billion people speak English either natively or as a second language (according to a 2022 Statistica report). And, whilst maths was never my strong point… I believe that still leaves 6.3 billion people. 6.3 billion brains, minds, cultures, backgrounds where communication is potentially problematic without our trusty (yet somewhat rusty) friend, Google Translate. By not expanding our linguistic horizons, we are quite frankly constructing our own fences in the world of business.

The reality is that the UK often fails in understanding the true value of linguists – and with my final year dissertation research focusing around modern foreign languages education in the UK compared to France, I’m aware the statistics for tomorrow’s workforce are bleak and already many UK universities are having to consider closing their languages departments.

According to a survey from the language learning app Preply, only 1/3 of UK adults are able to speak more than one language. And yes, of course English remains the ‘lingua franca’ of the business world, and of course it’s all a bit easier if we ‘just speak in English’ BUT it frankly isn’t true that ‘everyone speaks English’ and speaking from my experiences, I know that the relationships built when you can switch languages are stronger and more meaningful. A language is more than a transactional way of communicating. A language is just the face behind a whole new population of people with their own culture, their own values, their own history and politics.

So why should organisations value multilingual candidates more? We live in an incredibly well-connected world, so the more languages you have in you