Foreign languages, career choices and making money

Hi there, I'd like to talk about a topic which has been topical to me at work this week. My company is extremely international - amongst the entire team, we speak a total of 18 languages and that's because we have a talent pool from four continents. We are dealing with clients all over the world - from India to the Maldives to Italy to America to Spain to Chile. However, the language of business always defaults to English even if we do sometimes speak the same language as the client, even the documents are done in English. We got a bunch of documents in Italian the other day from our Italian clients and we had to ask them to get them officially translated to English before we can accept them for our due diligence purposes. Given that everyone we deal with are so happy to speak English in the business world (and hey, there's always Google Translate if you really get stuck), is there any point in trying to learn another language these days to try to boost your employment prospects? Or is English all you really need at the end of the day? As someone who speaks several languages, you may think that I may be biased in expecting everyone to learn a few languages but let's look at the evidence in the business world today and explore how foreign languages can boost your earning potential.

Will speaking more languages help you earn more?

Even if you do speak several languages, how much you will ultimately use them depends on the nature of your job - such is the difference between breadth and depth, allow me to explain the difference. In most major airports, you'll have a tourist information help desk where the staff are most likely to be multilingual and they cannot predict what languages they may need on a day by day basis. However, they are probably going to be dealing with fairly easy questions like, "is it faster to get the bus or the train into town? How much would a return ticket cost? When is the next bus going to leave? Where can I buy a bus ticket? Where will the bus terminate?" Not exactly rocket science and you don't really need a degree in the language to convey this kind of quite basic information. Contrast that to the project I am currently working on, where I am dealing with a lot of legal documents in Italian - sure I can speak Italian pretty well and can easily do the usual small talk with my clients in Italian, but when it comes to dealing with any official document, I need to get them translated into English because my Italian is good enough to give a tourist directions, but not good enough to understand a complex legal document. So apart from charming them in showing that I am making the effort to speak Italian, my ability to speak Italian isn't really useful on this project since we're effectively doing everything official in English.

Ironically, the ability to speak another language doesn't necessary mean that you will be able to get more well paid work. This is simply because English has become the default language of education around the world and anyone who has a degree is more than likely to be able to speak some English (some better than others I grant you that) - when I was at university in Paris, even though the lectures and tutorials were delivered in French, we were often given handouts and notes in English simply because all students at the university were expected to speak English well enough to use research material in English.  Hence if you go to France on a business trip for example, most of your business counterparts are more than likely to be quite fluent in English but you may struggle with the locals when buying a train ticket or getting your lunch in a cafe as that is when you're going to encounter service staff who are not highly educated. So I'm afraid this doesn't help my efforts to persuade you to learn another language - sure it may make your holiday a more pleasant and interesting experience when you can buy your train tickets or order your meals in the local language, but when it comes to business, you are probably going to get away with using just English in a lot of circumstances.

English is still the language of international business.

Yes there are jobs in the service industry which do involve serving people who don't speak English - without the influx of Chinese and Russian tourists, the tourism industry all over the world would have suffered a huge slump after the markets crashed in 2008. However, if you are merely a bilingual hotel receptionist who happens to serves Chinese or Russian tourists, then guess what? The Chinese tourist may have paid a lot of money to stay at the luxury hotel, you're still going to get paid very little as a hotel receptionist. The people who do make a lot of money in the hotels industry are those higher up the food chain whilst those who are actually interacting with the tourists (waiters, receptionists, concierges, bellhops etc) are near or at the bottom of the food chain. Those much higher up the food chain can be blissfully monolingual and as long as they can manage the staff who do need the language skills to fulfill the needs of the foreign tourists, then they don't really need to learn how to speak another language. Thus if you're looking for well paid jobs, I'm afraid all too often, language skills tend to point you in the direction of the service industry if you have little else to offer.

Another good example of this is in the airline industry - I love my European city breaks and I take loads of flights all over Europe. Typically, the cabin crew can speak a variety of languages on these flights - say you're flying from London to Rome; the cabin crew will definitely speak both English and Italian plus a number of other European languages like German, French, Spanish and Polish. Whilst you may marvel at their language skills, may I remind you that on a lot of these budget airlines, the cabin crew are not very well paid. So for example, cabin crew on Ryanair can be paid about €1200 to €1500 (£1050 to £1320) a month after tax, ouch. So if you were to take the average, that would be about £1185 a month or £14,220 a year. Compare that to pilots who are paid several times that. Salaries for more experienced pilots can range from £36,000 to £48,000 in a first officer role. The starting salary for a captain with a medium-sized airline may range from £57,000 to £78,000. Those employed by major operators can earn £97,000 to more than £140,000. Note that the starting pay for pilots are a lot higher and they climb really quickly whilst even after many years as cabin crew, your pay may climb to €1500-€2000 after tax as a supervisor. I've been on flights where the pilots only do the announcements in English whilst any translations are provided by the multi-lingual cabin crew. Unfortunately, it is very hard to earn a lot of money in the service industry - not unless you do what Paul Burrell did - he started out as a servant for the Queen and then became Princess Diana's butler but how many jobs like that are there out there for those in the service industry?

I have met successful people who are multilingual as well, but they rarely rely on their languages per se to make a living. They are experts in their respective fields and their ability to speak many languages simply gives them an edge over their monolingual or bilingual counterparts trying to do the same job. One of my best friends from gymnastics is the global head of structured credit at an investment bank - he speaks English, French, Spanish and Japanese fluently and German, Mandarin and Italian to a reasonably high standard. The fact that he is multilingual is simply a reflection of the fact that he picks up new information very quickly - that's a pretty common trait that most highly intelligent people have. That is the same ability that has allowed him to rise to the very top of his industry. His language ability is almost incidental as his work environment is very English speaking, he uses his languages with his friends, family and other social activities. Likewise, one of my colleagues speaks English, Croatian, Spanish, Serbian, German and Bosnian fluently plus a couple of others to a passable standard, but is she using any of these languages at work? No, not at all - well, apart from when I speak to her in Spanish and German because I am keen to practice those languages with her. Otherwise, like my friend who is the head of structured credit - her linguistic abilities merely reflect her ability to learn complex concepts very quickly and that is why she is brilliant at her job today. She is using those same skills to learn all about corporate finance - though I think it is a crying shame that she barely uses any of her many languages today.

I would like to highlight a problem associated with language teachers - you see, my father is a retired Chinese teacher and he is always telling his students how important Chinese is to find a good job. He would always point out that Chinese tourists spend a lot of money and the Chinese tourists who show up in somewhere like London or Singapore are likely to be very rich. Even if that is the case, people working in the service industry and the tourism industry rarely ever reap the benefits of the rich Chinese tourists and the kind of jobs associated with language skills are more likely to be those at the very bottom end of the food chain, where you earn £20,000 a year rather than £200,000 or £2 million. I have nothing against teachers per se - they do a terribly difficult job, one I certainly cannot do but teachers like my parents fall prey to a common mistake. They often claim that what they are teaching is so important that the students cannot possibly survive, let alone get a half decent job if they don't pay attention in their class. Imagine a teacher who says, "what I am teaching you is probably going to be useless, so it doesn't matter if you pay attention or not, feel free to take out your mobile phones in my lesson or have a short nap if you get bored. okay?" So please, language teachers are there to teach you the language, not to give you any career advice - not unless you wish to become a language teacher yourself. 

What about becoming a language teacher then?

What about teaching languages then? Well, it's not a bad option but it's not a great option either. Teachers certainly get paid a lot more than those in the service industry like hotel staff or cabin crew - but the problem with teaching is that it requires a very special set of skills to control a class of students, especially if they are badly behaved! I certainly couldn't do that, goodness me. Teaching is a calling, it is not for everyone. I would be an awful teacher - I would just lose my temper and I would probably get impatient with the students who simply do not learn as quickly as others. In order to become a language teacher, you need to be fluent in at least two languages: let's take the example of a Spanish teacher in the UK. Clearly the teacher needs to be totally fluent in Spanish but also in English, because you are going to need to use some English to explain the more complex concepts in English to the students who may not understand that same explanation in English. Whilst being a teacher wouldn't make you rich, you wouldn't struggle to make ends meet and there are the long school holidays as well. However, whilst teachers could afford to buy nice Christmas presents (price tag: £500) and take exotic holidays abroad (price tag: £5,000), they may still struggle to get on the property ladder (price tag: £500,000) as they are not earning that much at the end of the day. Well, not unless you become a celebrity tutor like those in Hong Kong who are in extremely high demand and earn millions: that's taking teaching to a whole new level.

So with this in mind, should you bother learning another language at all? Well, I think the answer depends on the individual. Essentially you want to prove that you're a highly intelligent person who is a fast learner: you can prove that by learning several languages and becoming a polyglot. Not everyone can pick up a language that quickly, of course a lot of it depends on how you choose to study the language and even picking the right language(s) to study in the first place, but you also need some talent, a gift for languages to become a polyglot in the first place. My partner has been with me for nearly 20 years now and I have tried at various times to teach him the basics of Mandarin which I thought, well why not, let's see if he can learn. He has failed miserably, he simply cannot retain the information in his head and whilst he can speak some French, allow me to give you an example of how his brain cannot categorize information from other languages. When we last visited Singapore, I taught him how to say xie xie ni (Mandarin), terima kasih (Malay) and romba nandri (Tamil). I would never forget the time when he was being served at a hawker center by an old Indian man and I nudged him, go on this is your moment to shine. Cue pregnant pause and he finally said, "xie xie ni". I covered my face with my palms at once to control my reaction (told you I was a bad teacher) but the Indian man burst out laughing as he thought it was absolutely hilarious. Is my partner stupid? No far from it, he just isn't good with languages that's all. He has a PhD in satellite technology and has worked on a number of IT start ups which he has taken from concept to the point where he has sold his share of the the company off for millions each time. But for him, languages just do not come easily - in fact, he's even dyslexic and misspells words in English sometimes. But just because he sucks at languages doesn't mean that he is stupid - he has simply chosen other methods to prove that he is a highly intelligent person.

Nonetheless, being able to speak another language will give you an edge in a highly competitive job market. There is the possibility that your language skills may come in useful in the job but even if you are going into a predominantly English-speaking work environment, your ability to speak a foreign language (or three) fluently will still prove your ability to learn something very complex, that you have a brain that is flexible and adaptable enough to figure out grammar in another language which can be vastly different from English. There are of course, so many ways you can prove your brilliance to an employer apart from learning a difficult language like Hindi, Arabic or Japanese, for example, if you have developed your own app for example, then you could whip out your phone during the interview and offer the interviewer a chance to see the app right there and then, that would be a brilliant way to get their attention and help you stand out from the more mundane candidates.When you are down to the final stages in the selection process, you could be up against a few other very credible candidates and being able to speak another language fluently may just be what gets you over the finishing line. It is just like the 100 meters finals at the 2016 Olympics when even the last place runner clocked in at 10.06 seconds, but as there is only one gold medal, you have to be faster than everyone else if you do want that gold medal.

And finally, I would like to dedicate a paragraph to my readers in Singapore - Chinese is useless in that context. And no, I am not saying this just because I have a difficult relationship with my father who is a retired Chinese teacher, but let's look at the situation in greater detail. You want a language that will make you stand out from the crowd, your USP needs to be something few others have: well in Singapore, all Chinese kids have little choice but to do Chinese at school as a subject and simply being able to speak Mandarin means you're like the 70% of people in Singapore who do know Chinese - you're not special, you're common as muck. That does mean all that effort put into passing those Chinese exams has been a total waste of time. Whereas if you're fluent in something like Russian, that does make you stand out from the crowd in Singapore. Besides, the average standard of Chinese in Singapore is low - if you're up for a job that does require a high standard of Chinese, you'll be competing against migrant workers from China who have grown up with Chinese as a mother tongue and first language, there's just no way you can compete against them unless you're as good as them (which is highly unlikely in the case of most Singaporeans). Indeed, in some countries like Switzerland, Finland and Belgium, being trilingual is the norm and if you speak only two languages fluently, well then you'd better hope that you have great skills in other aspects of your life because you're highly deficient in the languages department.

Furthermore, I find the situation in Singapore very depressing when it comes to languages - I am old enough to remember a time when not everyone spoke English and you had Chinese people who spoke some Malay or Indian people who spoke some Hokkien, it was quite a random mix how we communicated with each other without English as a lingua franca. However, with English becoming the language of instruction in all Singaporean schools since the mid 1970s, everyone speaks some English now and the standard of the Asian languages has dropped. I was mortified to meet a Singaporean in London recently who had a really strong Singaporean accent, so naturally I switched to Mandarin because I thought she would be more comfortable speaking in Mandarin but  she was even more inarticulate in Mandarin and asked me if we could speak in English instead. I then realized, oh shit, Singapore has created a generation of Singlish speakers who can neither express themselves in English nor Mandarin. These people may be perfectly at home in Toa Payoh or Tampines, but the moment you put them in London or Beijing, then they will be in trouble trying to communicate - never mind putting them somewhere like Paris or Moscow! It is a double whammy because at least monolingual Russians do speak Russian fluently but many Singaporeans are not even fluent enough in a single language to be easily understood outside Singapore and Malaysia. Now that's a pretty depressing situation I'm afraid.

How many Singaporeans can speak Mandarin well enough to work in China?

Okay, so that's it from me on this topic. What do you think? How many languages do you speak? Do you work in a multilingual environment? If you speak more than one language, how many do you actually use at work? Should we be making our children study more languages or focus on other skills like coding? Is there any point in learning a foreign language unless you're going to be nearly fluent in it? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.