Speaking a Foreign Language Opens Employment Doors
Baltimore Sun

Habla usted espanol? Parlez-vous francais?  Sprechen sie deutsches? Si! Oui! Ja!

If you answered yes…in any language…then good for you. Your job prospects just got that much better.

Just ask Professor Thomas Deveny of McDaniel College in Westminster. Deveny, Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, can tick off numerous instances where his students have been called on to use their Spanish skills in career fields as diverse as public safety, healthcare, and banking…to name just a few.

“The Hispanic population in this country is here,” says Deveny. “By reaching out to them, businesses get more clients.”

BB&T Bank, for example, which is headquartered in North Carolina but has branches in Maryland, not only offers a Website in Spanish for its Spanish-speaking customers, but is also advertising—in Spanish—for Spanish-speaking employees.

Because of the growing Hispanic population, both Johns Hopkins Health System and Hospital and the Baltimore City Police Department are also seeking Spanish-speaking employees. In an international healthcare environment such as Hopkins, says Career Services Manager Denise Lannon, there is a rising need for employees who are at least bilingual (and the more languages you know, the better).

All areas of the hospital—from clinical specialties to patient financial services to the international department which serves patients who come to Hopkins from all over the world--can use multilingual speakers, says Lannon.

The Baltimore City Police Department has such a need for Spanish-speaking officers for the city’s growing Hispanic population that this spring it initiated a recruitment effort in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

But it’s not just Spanish speakers who are sought in the workplace. Arabic, Chinese, Korean… you name it, if you can speak it, you’re in demand.

And that demand is probably only going to increase, say both employment and language specialists, as the number of U.S. residents for whom English is not a native language continues to rise. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, reports that the nation’s Hispanic population will increase from 38.2 million to 49.3 million by 2015. Similarly, the Asian population is expected to grow from 11.6 million to 17.4 million.

But it’s not just the growing numbers of foreign-born residents living in the U.S. that make language skills such a valuable commodity. “Knowledge of a foreign language has always been an additional skill that employers liked to see in their employees,” says Professor Martine Motard-Noar, Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at McDaniel College. ”With that said, however, the awareness that it is better to know a foreign language increased after 9/11.”

Indeed, just days after the tragic events in September 2001, the U.S. government waspledging grant money to graduate schools that would either develop or create languageprograms, especially in the so-called "critical" languages for our national security, such as Pashtu, Arabic, Farsi, etc. This Bush administration proposal, called the National Security Language Initiative, has received bipartisan support.    

The Federal government is so concerned about the lack of foreign language skills among Americans that it recently convened a panel to discuss the growing deficit in foreign language ability throughout the government as well as in society at large.

“I am concerned that the United States as a whole lags behind much of the world with respect to foreign language education,” said Sen. Daniel K. Akaka of Hawaii, adding that, according to the 2000 census, only 9.3 percent of Americans speak both their native language and another language fluently—compared with 52.7 percent of Europeans.

“Shortages of skilled language personnel…are complicating the government’s efforts in trade, peacekeeping, diplomacy, security and intelligence,” according to a brief prepared by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. 

The National Security Agency values foreign language skills so highly that on its website, www.nsa.gov, it is currently posting a $7,500 recruitment incentive for language analysts, particularly those with Asian or Middle Eastern language skills.

“Employers know that people who can speak another language have the kind of  mental flexibility, as well as work ethic, that it takes to constantly work on language acquisition,” says Motard-Noar.

And no matter what field you’re in, she adds, employers believe that just having the ability to speak a foreign language is proof that you can perform well, even in delicate cross-cultural situations.

According to Motard-Noar, this is definitely a good time to be a foreign language major—in any language. She also believes that it is “borderline suicidal,” from a career standpoint, not to be able to speak at least rudimentary Spanish. “All employers in any industry will be considering the ability to handle a simple conversation in Spanish as a requirement, something that will mark you as outdated if you don’t have it,” she says.

Steven Rothberg, president and founder of Minneapolis-based CollegeRecruiter.com, agrees. “This is probably the best market for graduates with foreign-language skills that we've seen since we launched an employment magazine in 1995 and then our web site in 1996,” he says. “Students with any foreign language skills have a tremendous advantage over those of their classmates who only speak English. We’re seeing a huge demand from the federal government and corporations for those who speak and read foreign languages, especially Chinese, Korean, Farsi, Arabic, and Spanish. But even those who speak other languages, such as French, are in high demand because those language skills are also needed and some government agencies and corporations are willing to train employees who speak two languages to speak three or more languages.”

“It makes the job a heck of a lot easier when you can speak to others in their native language,” says McDaniel’s Thomas Deveny.