How Foreign Language Skills Can Help Your Career
Table of Contents
Foreign Language Skills Bring Greater Job Opportunities
The job market is always changing. While decades ago, a different set of skills was required from a prospective employee, nowadays, foreign language abilities are one of the most required skills. While there is nothing wrong with knowing only your native language, it is, however, kind of limiting in terms of finding job opportunities. But if you’re an individual who happens to know more than one language, get ready to sort out through job opportunities you’re going to get.
Foreign Language Skills Increase Your Earning Potential
Foreign language skills can bring greater job opportunities, but they also can bring you higher incomings. With these language abilities, you can aim for jobs that pay more or even get promoted to more senior positions and earn more. Either way, you stand on a win-win situation.
Foreign Language Skills Improve Your Hiring Prospects
When it comes to hiring new personnel, every little detail could make the difference for employers. They’ll be looking for something that sets you apart from all other applicants. If you know a foreign language and have added that to your resume, that could be your advantage. You’ll have the chance to land the job hundreds of applicants were after. While having a set of different skills is certainly essential, language skills are considered the ‘hottest’ job skills. In an article written by the Cnn, fluency in a foreign language was considered one of the most required skills by the Fortune 500 companies, the army, the State Department, hospitals, schools, and local courts.
Whenever you feel like giving up on learning a new language, remind yourself what an advantage a foreign language can be in your CV.
Foreign Language Skills Make You a Better Leader
Just like we said above, when you know a foreign language, you become a better communicator. Better communication skills make you a better leader. When you understand the people you work with, their ideas and concerns, you will know how to respond to them. You cannot put to use other virtues like empathy and compassion when you don’t really understand your team.
Besides communication, being bilingual helps you make better decisions. As a leader, most of the time, it’s you the person who has to make certain important decisions. You want those decisions to be as rational as possible. When you’re a person that is proficient in more than one language, the process of decision-making can become much easier. When we think in a foreign language, we usually put emotions aside and rely on analytical. This experience will prove useful to you as a leader as you’ll become more objective and, in turn, make objective decisions.
Foreign Language Skills Make You a More Effective Communicator
When you’re a team member or a team leader in a particular department, one of the primary skills you need to have developed is the ability to communicate clearly and effectively. Not all people have developed this specific skill. However, this is where people with more than one language proficiency excel. Communication is their forte. The reason behind this ability is that when you learn a new language from scratch, you become better at your own native language. You learn to analyze the native language from different angles by finding similarities and differences between your first and second language.
Knowing a second language will prove useful when dealing with a bilingual team. Many companies worldwide have multi-national teams. Knowing both of the languages spoken by the team makes you an even more critical individual for the organization. You can clearly communicate with all the people involved and thus understand what each of them has to say.
Indeed, foreign language skills are valuable in many different aspects of our life. One of them happens to be our professional life. We’re not debating whether foreign language skills are relevant but rather what we can do to actually learn one. For starters, you can enroll in a language program, for instance, in an ESL program or any other. Then, you’ll get to reap the benefits of that language on your career life.
