Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Not Speaking a Second Language Can Kill Your Career


Louise Harel's (Leader of Vision Montreal party and candidate for Mayor of Montreal) case of not wanting to hold a debate in English with the other 2 candidates because she is not fluent enough is a very good example of how not speaking a second language can jeopardize your career. If you read some of the comments people have made about the CTV news article, it is very clear she will lose a lot of followers due to that incident.

Many people nowadays suffer from this same problem, and mostly in a bilingual country whose companies are increasing the amount of business they do abroad year after year. Whether it is Chinese, Spanish, German, etc. Canadian companies are requiring more and more to communicate in other languages when dealing with clients, head offices, afiliates, etc.

Don't let this happen to you, learn another language!

4 comments:

  1. I can understand the reaction being a politician in a bilingual country. I hardly use Spanish at work, other than to socialize with other Latin-Americans. Does it really make a competitive difference in other fields?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think it depends on the company you work for and the industry. Spanish is becoming very popular in the mining industry. Also Scotiabank, due to their business in Latin America prefers to hire people who speak both Englsih and Spanish...

    ReplyDelete
  3. For me speaking both languages -Spanish/English- makes a big difference, no matter what kind of industry, company or activity i work for. It's a reallity that the Globalization forces me to do that not only to doing business but to meet people, read articles, books or education issues. We live in an small world, so let spanish/english skills to connect to each other.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes you are absolutely right. Not Speaking a Second Language can kill our Career. Time has change and now more people all over the world has realized that learning other language other than their native language is very important for their personal development and even for the economy of their country.
    Spanish school Costa Rica

    ReplyDelete