U.S. employers increasingly rely on multilingual employees to advance their goals, but many have lost business because they don’t have staff who can communicate in languages other than English, finds a new report from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
Based on a survey of 1,200 managers and human resources professionals with knowledge of their organization’s foreign language needs, the report highlights the critical demand for employees who can communicate in multiple languages.
A third of the survey respondents reported that their needs for foreign language skills were not being met by current employees. Overall, Spanish, Mandarin, French, Japanese, and German were the most in-demand languages, the report found.
