Europe’s Changing Landscape: Languages for the World of Work

Wolfgang Mackiewicz, coordinator of the CELAN project and president of CEL/ELC, held a keynote speech on languages for the World of Work on the occasion of the Symposium, including an Award ceremony, on Europe’s Changing Landscape in Carlsberg Academy, Copenhagen, last October. Download the speech here.
Before all else, I should like to say how pleased and honoured I am to have been invited by the Hedford Foundation to speak at this Symposium. I have to admit, though, that I also feel slightly nervous. Not only is the European Union of today more multifaceted than ever before - our societies and economies have been undergoing rapid and significant changes in recent years – changes directly relevant to language use, individual language profiles, linguistic demands, and the linguistic and cultural fabric of our societies. Before I reflect on some of these changes and on challenges and opportunities resulting from them, allow me to say a few words about my association, the Conseil européen pour les langues/European Language Council – the ELC, as it is commonly known.
The ELC was founded with support from the European Commission in 1997. It is a non-profitmaking association under Belgian law. It has some 160 members in Europe and beyond – mainly higher education institutions and specialist associations. It also admits individuals as associate members. We have six member institutions in Denmark, among them Aarhus Universitet and Copenhagen Business School. Karen M. Lauridsen is our current treasurer.
The ELC aims to promote the study of languages and cultures, including intercultural communication, so as to encourage the multilingual and multicultural development of Europe and internationally. It subscribes to an all-encompassing view of the area of languages in higher education – language teaching and learning in the widest sense, language degree programmes, teacher education, the training of translators and interpreters and of other language professionals, and research related to these subareas. It has two pillars of activity – the preparation and launch of European development, network and research projects, and the development of policies and strategies at institutional, national and European levels. It closely cooperates with four directorates-general of the European Commission, and with the Council of Europe. It has always stayed clear of ideology and politics.
The ELC firmly believes that higher education programmes and provision have to respond to social and professional needs and demands, including the needs of the labour market. We also think that higher education institutions have a role in identifying these needs and demands. Hence we have always sought to engage in dialogue with employers, business representative organisations, employee organisations and the social partners. For example, in one of the three sub-projects of our third Thematic Network Project in Area of Languages and of the subsequent Dissemination Network project, carried out from 2003 to 2007 under the EU’s Socrates Programme, we took a close look at “Languages for enhanced opportunities on the European labour market”. We organised workshops with business people from across Europe, and we conducted Europe-wide surveys among language and non-language graduates, and employers and employer organisations. Among the recommendations that emanated from the project was the following. “Needs analyses and studies should be undertaken on a regular basis in order to obtain robust information about language requirements in the various sectors of the labour market, including the public sector and international non-governmental organisations, and about language-related trends in the employment of university graduates. The information obtained in this way would provide additional reference points for curriculum development and innovation.” I am sure it will not surprise you when I tell you that the sub-project in question was co-ordinated by a colleague from Copenhagen Business School.
The ELC has continued to travel along this road. Its president chairs the Business Platform for Multilingualism created by the European Commission in September 2009 – a direct outcome of the Business Forum for Multilingualism, in which Mr Henning Dyremose had a leading role. The Business Platform launched an EU Network project – CELAN – Network for the promotion of language strategies for employability and competitiveness. And we are currently also involved in a project supported by the Council of Europe’s Centre for Modern Languages in Graz – LINCQ – Languages in corporate quality – the first time the Council of Europe is looking at languages in the labour market.
The Business Platform was originally based on the ambitious social and economic agenda of the Lisbon Strategy. Just to remind you, at the Barcelona Council of March 2002, the heads of state and government underlined the fundamental importance of education and training for a competitive economy, calling for action to improve the mastery of basic skills, “in particular by teaching at least two foreign languages from a very early age”, and the “establishment of a linguistic competence indicator in 2003”. As you know, things did not quite work out like this. It took no less than ten years for the first European Survey on Language Competences to become reality – however, neither Denmark nor Germany saw fit to participate in the exercise. One thing is clear, though. We are still far away from the 1+>2 objective. Now the European Commission is seeking to put new life into the formula by linking it to the objectives of Europe 2020 – smart, sustainable and inclusive growth, and jobs.
The Business Platform was originally comprised of 21 European stakeholder organisations – twelve intermediary organisations, such as BusinessEurope, Eurochambres, and the European Trade Union Confederation; an EU body; two higher education associations; and six specialist organisations and networks, among them the ELC. The overarching aim of the Platform was to promote multilingualism for competitiveness and employability. The Platform adopted the following mission statement.
Provision to European enterprises and individuals of services and tools to enable them to improve their professional performance through effective language strategies, and to provide the European Commission and Member State governments with pertinent advice. The Platform subscribes to two basic tenets.
(i) Platform deliberations and activities have to be business driven.
(ii) While examples of successful practice are important for awareness raising and selecting/adopting new strategies, one should never forget that in multilingualism for business – as in so many other language-related matters – no one size fits all.
It has to be admitted that the Platform has so far not been a great success. Members tend to have their own specific interests, and many of the umbrella business representative organisations represented on the Platform are at least as far removed from enterprise as many, if not most of our universities. This is why I was grateful that the Commission provided funding for a two-year network project designed to implement part of the Platform’s mission and goals.
For the CELAN Network project, we envisaged a three-step activity plan. Step One: Research into companies’ linguistic and language-related needs. Step Two: Research into language industry products, tools and services that can enable employers and employees to overcome language and language-related needs. Step Three: Development of an on-line interactive language needs analysis tool, allowing business users to identify their language needs and to match these with available resources.
This approach reflects what companies that are considering the possibility of going international have to do. They have to reach a proper understanding of their needs in terms of multilingual and intercultural communication processes; they have to acquire an adequate knowledge of the human and technological resources available that can enable enterprises to meet language and language-related needs; and they have to match their own specific needs with available resources.
In the event, things turned out to be much more complex and challenging than we had anticipated. In Step One, we carried out an EU-wide survey among enterprises and business representative organisations. Apart from the obvious questions regarding size and sector, and languages used in the organization, we asked organisations, among other things,
- whether languages mattered for their operation – in relations with partners, suppliers, customers, the company’s own human resources, and headquarters abroad;
- whether they thought things would change over the next few years;
- whether they had in-house language skills;
- whether command of a foreign language was important in the recruitment of new staff;
- what motivated the use of languages in their business – economic reasons, cultural reasons, or quality reasons;
- whether they had a formal language development policy.
We also asked them how useful specific language services were for their business, and how they rated their awareness of the services offered by the language industry. We also requested them to indicate in what specific business activities they commonly have to perform foreign languages were required – ranging from the preparation of communication material to interacting in teams/with colleagues/with headquarters. Finally, we wanted to know who in a given company needed which language skills – management, technicians etc.
I would need the whole of the afternoon to present the outcomes of the survey to you. We received a total of 543 responses, 157 of which came from business representative organizations. We knew before the launch of the survey that the results would not be representative in quantitative terms. It stood to reason that enterprises that did not regard languages as being relevant to their performance would not bother to respond. Moreover, we were also aware of the fact that in EU-15 a number of similar surveys had been carried out in recent years, as a result of which survey fatigue could be expected. I am all the more grateful that 14% of the respondents were based in Denmark – thank you ever so much for this, Karen.
The full report is available on the CELAN platform. Allow me, therefore, to highlight a few key findings and conclusions.
1) Languages play a fundamental role in European businesses for their development in a globalised world. Multilingualism has become a must for business growth. 90% of respondents stated that language skills are important for their operations – in descending order, in relations with customers (63%), partners, headquarters abroad, suppliers, and human resources (47%).
2) European business relies on the labour market for the supply of human resources with the language skills required. 86% of the responding businesses use the recruitment route for satisfying their foreign language needs.
3) European business understands that in addition to overt economic considerations, there are other reasons for getting multilingual – cultural and quality motivations. It could, however, be argued that culture and quality are becoming key elements in the economic development of businesses.
4) A majority of the responding enterprises still lack a corporate language development policy.
5) Respondents have a good, albeit far from complete overview of the tools and services offered by the language industry and use them as appropriate.
6) Of the 375 companies that responded to the question which languages they needed, a hundred respondents provided an answer with regard to oriental languages. Of these, 35 indicated that these languages were most important to relatively important for them. Unsurprisingly, large companies with a work force of 250+ and a turnover of more than 50 million euro stressed the new need for oriental languages.
Let’s not forget that this survey cannot be regarded as being representative in quantitative terms. However, I do believe that the questions we included in the questionnaire could be a basis for interviews conducted by higher education institutions with employers and employer organizations, and that the responses received provide a solid indication of where our enterprises stand and where they see their future. In all this, we should not forget that SMEs, which are traditionally considered the growth driver of Europe’s economies, used to provide goods and services for their regions or at best for the nation states in which they were based. They first had to or still have to recognize the opportunities offered by the Single Market, and once they had or have done that, they have to come to understand the linguistic and cultural demands of trans-European business activity, and they have to match these demands with appropriate strategies. The CELAN survey also revealed that SMEs are beginning to appreciate the need for oriental languages.
Before I leave CELAN, allow me to mention just two more things. I think I am not overstating things when I say that the CELAN Network has prepared the first ever comprehensive annotated catalogue of business-relevant services, tools, resources, policies and strategies and their current uptake in the business community in Europe. In the age of globalization, an ever increasing number of products and services are offered to a growing number of language communities. In order to cope with this situation, language technology and language technology tools have been and continue to be developed related to
• translation technologies,
• text technologies,
• terminology management systems,
• speech technology and speech technology tools, and
• content management systems.
I am afraid I cannot go into detail here. However, to give you at least some idea of what all this is about, let me just say that translation technologies include machine translation systems, computer-assisted translation tools and systems, localization systems, and translation / localization project / job management systems. Even large international companies do not necessarily use the technologies and tools themselves – indeed, language services, and language service providers have become a booming industry with high growth rates. As a result of globalization, there is a growing demand for
• translation services,
• localization services,
• interpretation services,
• desktop publishing services,
• language teaching and training of various kinds, and
• language industry consultancy services.
I have to admit that I was overwhelmed by these findings – and their economic implications. For example, a language service provider based in Italy has developed a formula according to which localizing a Web site for twenty different markets, including Australia, Brazil, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States gives a company access to 80% of the worldwide online sales potential.
When it comes to the uptake of these services, tools, and resources, it should be clear that large-scale industry can afford to develop any kind of language technology tools and language and content resources as well as develop language services internally, or use any kind of language service provider through outsourcing. For example, a major international car manufacturer has installed a language management team for the identification of multilingual and cultural communication processes in the company; the implementation of these processes has, however, been outsourced to a language service provider. Needless to say, SMEs are under stronger financial constraints and subject to fierce competition. Most of them probably do not have the capacity to investigate how they could benefit from state-of-the-art language technology tools and language service providers.
Please do not misunderstand me. Far be it from me to exclude the human factor when it comes to languages for growth and jobs. However, it should also be clear that as a result of the advances I have just described, our graduates may well be confronted with new linguistic, language-related and cultural demands that go beyond the competence in languages of the wider world.
This is why I think consultation and collaboration between higher education and enterprise is more urgently needed than ever before. This is why in late August, we launched a consultation among higher education institutions directly or indirectly involved in the CELAN Network; among other things, we are keen to find out whether, when it comes to language provision, our universities have contacts with the labour market through
- internships of BA students
- regular graduate career tracking
- regular contacts with businesses – including SMEs
– and business representative organisations in the region and whether they have used information obtained in this way for revising their programmes and offerings, for example by introducing languages of the wider world as well as appropriate language technologies and pertinent language resources. Again, the questionnaire can be downloaded from the CELAN Web site; and the survey report will also eventually be published on the Web site. Meanwhile, allow me to say this. We need new forms of collaboration and consultation between higher education and enterprise. More about this in a minute.
There are three more issues that I would like to mention briefly. The Economist Intelligence Unit has recently published a report entitled “Competing across borders. How cultural and communication barriers affect business”. The paper draws on two main sources – a global survey of 572 executives conducted earlier this year, and a series of in-depth interviews with independent experts and senior executives from a number of major international companies.
Allow me a quote a key sentence. “The survey findings reveal a corporate world that has at least recognized a new reality in which the right products and services must also be allied with the necessary cultural sensitivity and communication skills in order for companies to succeed in markets away from home …. Many organisations have yet to adopt measures that will turn this realization into practice.” Here are some of the key messages emanating from the survey.
• Effective cross-border communication and collaboration are becoming critical to the financial success of companies.
• Most companies understand the cost of not improving the cross-border communication skills of their employees, yet many are not doing enough to address the challenge.
• Organisations with international ambitions increasingly expect prospective employees to be fluent in key foreign languages. Mandarin is considered the second-most important foreign language, but just 8% say their workers will need to be fluent in it.
• Misunderstandings rooted in cultural differences present the greatest obstacle to productive cross-border collaboration.
• The impact of good cross-border collaboration on a company’s financial performance is now widely recognized.
• About one quarter of the companies surveyed said that at least half their employees regularly need to speak in a foreign language.
I do hope that you have found my message convincing – there is no one size that fits all. Every company has to find out what the linguistic and cultural demands resulting from its business strategy are, and every company has to develop and implement the linguistic and cultural strategies required for the implementation of its business strategy.
I happen to believe that this has fundamental implications for higher education programmes and provision as well as for consultation and collaboration between higher education and enterprise – and it has wider implications for language learning and assessment.
(i) Universities have to intensify their contacts with business, for example, contacts with enterprises in the region. In this way, they can get a clearer idea of the linguistic and cultural demands linked to trans-European and international business activities – in terms of languages, and language and cultural sill and competences, including the use of language technology. If Mandarin Chinese is the order of the day, then – needless to say - we have to offer courses in Chinese language and culture.
(ii) Since a large number of enterprises seem to be unaware of the potential of the language industry, universities should regard it as their responsibility to obtain a comprehensive overview of the tools and resources provided by the language industry – in order to provide advice to employers and to pay proper attention to this dimension of language use in their own courses and provision. This may require co-operation between university units that do not normally talk to each. Earlier this year, I attended a meeting in Brussels that went by the name of “LT summit”. During the coffee break, a young man came up to me who works at my University on a LT project. I did not have the foggiest idea of this initiative. In other words, we also need to find new forms of co-operation in our universities.
(iii) Enterprises should not expect universities to deliver tailor-made graduates to them. (a) Universities have to prepare their students for lifelong language learning. Companies cannot predict their linguistic and cultural needs in ten or twenty years from now; graduates do not know what will be required of them in ten, let alone in thirty years from now. Hence, formal education has to equip students with learning-to-learn skills – something that has become a corner stone of the EU’s education policy. (b) What this means is that companies have to be prepared to create on-the-job language learning opportunities for their workforce.
(iv) Multilingual competence, therefore, has to be seen in terms of dynamic repertoires, subject to continuous development in line with the lifelong learning paradigm – be it that a language that is part of an individual’s repertoire has to be further developed in response to changing needs, be it that a new language needs to be added to the repertoire. And linked to this – our graduates have to be prepared for self-assessment – they have to be able to assess their linguistic and cultural competences in relation to specific requirements and, if necessary, take appropriate remedial action.
(v) It is also true that many of our graduates do not find their first job in the region or state where their university is based.
(vi) A lot of language learning is now taking place outside formal educational settings as a result of trans-European mobility and migration into the Union. All EU Member States have become multilingual and multicultural societies, and many of us study and work in multilingual and multicultural organisations. My own University, Freie Universität Berlin, is a case in point. About 25% of our students are international students, with an increasingly large number of Chinese students, but also a substantial number of students from Scandinavian countries. For example, many Erasmus students opt for FUB because of our language offerings, ranging from Arabic to Turkish. What is equally, if not more important is the fact that these international students do not remain in their national clusters, but mix freely with students from around the globe. We try to encourage the potential this presents for language learning by encouraging them to form language tandems and trios – not just for informal, but also for non-formal learning. That is to say, we encourage them to conclude learning agreements in which they state the language learning outcomes they hope to be able to achieve. Needless to say, German students benefit from this arrangement as well.
(vii) This raises the question as to how the outcomes of informal and nonformal language learning can be assessed and documented. I do not know whether you are aware of this – on 5 September, the European Commission released a proposal for a Council Recommendation on the validation of non-formal and informal learning, which calls on Member States to establish national systems for the validation of non-formal and non-formal learning by 2015.
(viii) In all this, we have to be aware of the fact that – as becomes clear from the Economist survey – people do not have to be a hundred per cent competent in all the languages they have.
(ix) Because of the increasingly rapid changes our societies and economies are confronted with, we have to develop modes of accelerated language learning. As regards Europe, we should be aware of the fact that our languages belong to language families – Germanic, Romance, Slavonic. If I as a German need to learn Danish, I should not have to do it the same way that speakers of Slavonic languages have to take.
(x) In this day and age of multilingual profiles, we should perhaps stop talking of mother tongue and foreign languages. For one thing, which languages are foreign languages at a university like my University, where 25% of the student population is international students and a large number of courses are taught in English? For another, you cannot take it for granted that someone whose first language is this, that, or the other can perform all professionally relevant tasks in this language.
All this raises the issue of how enterprises that are aware of their linguistic and cultural needs can assess the linguistic competences of job applicants and of their own employees. This is definitely un defies majeur – and this is where the ECML LINCQ project comes in. We want to raise awareness among employers of the informal and non-formal learning paradigm and the potential ways in which this experience can be recorded and assessed, in order to enhance recognition, especially in the corporate world. (See the flyer put out outside.) Ladies and gentlemen, I do apologise for boring you stiff with my Euro speak. Allow me to provide you with some anecdotal evidence.
Case No. 1
A student assistant of mine – by accident the son of FUB’s registrar. At BA level, he studied history of art and Italian. At the beginning of Year Three, he rushed into my office and broke down in tears. He had found himself in an Italian language module where half the participants were orally fluent because of their family background. I immediately decided to send him under Erasmus student mobility to Torino. When he got there, he was confronted with the fact that Italy’s universities had gone on strike. My colleague at Torino came up with a rescue plan. She got him an internship in a publishing house, where he had to operate in Italian, English, and German. Within a short period of time, he realized what he was able to do and not to do with regard to his job in the three languages in question. He took remedial action, and organized non-formal language learning scenarios – during daytime hours with Italian friends, and in the evening with British and American friends.
Case No. 2
At the beginning of this year, we advertised the position of head of the ELC secretariat at FUB. In the end we went for a 24-year-old US citizen, who at that time was doing an internship in the Multilingualism Policy Unit of the Commission’s DG for Education and Culture. Her first language is American English, but she also has French, German, and Chinese. She did a BA in International Relations at the University of California, started learning Chinese there, but decided that her command of Chinese was not really what it ought to be. Because of this, she suspended her course for six months. She went to Taipeh, followed a course in Chinese for six months, moved in with a local family, got herself an internship at a municipal library, and was therefore able to learn Chinese in an informal way. She now has a very clear idea of what she can do – and cannot do, for that matter – in Chinese. After her BA, she did an Erasmus Mundus Master at the Universities of Leipzig and Vienna – which was taught in English. But she was keen to seize the opportunity to learn German – as she was studying in two German-speaking countries. So she organized language tandems in Leipzig and Vienna – and she is now fairly fluent in German. Definitely a new generation of global players.
Case No. 3
International business communication is not just about communication in and for a given company. A couple of yours ago, two nephews of mine, working at Siemens in Berlin, were sent to Copenhagen for six months. They did not foresee any problems – after all, the corporate language is English. Sure enough, when they got to Copenhagen, everything was fine – business was done in English. However, after the end of a working day, they crossed the street and went to a bar – where all the talk was in Danish. They immediately realized that if they wanted to be accepted by their Danish colleagues, they had to learn Danish. And to their surprise, they came to realize that the two languages are not hundreds of miles apart.
I do apologise for speaking far too long. I very much look forward to our discussion: THANK FOR YOUR ATTENTION.