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The danger of being English
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Stephen Bray Monday 2 April 2012 |
In 1853, Cecil Rhodes wrote that "To be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life". This was probably true for many years and to be born with English as a primary language was almost a gift from the Gods.
Sadly, this argument is no longer true. The modern equivalent might be to be born in Liege or Maastricht where you will grow up speaking French and German as local languages and probably have English as a taught language.
Innate language skills become important for employment, particularly with larger companies. Skills based employees such as engineers and computer programmers may be equally competent from any country but it just makes sense for the employer to hire the one that has portable language skills rather than one that has only English.
It would be rather good if the Government started to focus on the fact that our reliance on other people to speak English may be about to come back and bite us.
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Chris Wilson 7 June 2012, 04:53PM | |
This is so true. I sat on an interview panel for two programmers to join us. My manager led the interviews and we had some British and some EU candidates. There was not much difference between the technical skills of the candidates, they all did PHP and had the required Unix skills. They were all pretty bight and seemed to grasp the business model very quickly. It was language skills and personality that led to a decision. The guy from Sweden was by far the best. His English was superb and his written language was noticeably better than that of the three British candidates. His German was also very good (my manager speaks pretty fluent German). He had also done courses in Business management as part of his degree. Very scary that he had crammed so much in in only a few years as he was one of the younger candidates. | |
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