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Language learning
How Knowledge of Languages Is More Valuable Than Ever on the Job Market
It’s not a skill issue, but a marketing issue
People have been excitedly discussing ways to make language learning obsolete for years. One of the most commonly evoked ideas is that of an earplug that translates the language of your interlocutor live so that you can have a fluent conversation even without knowing the other person’s language. With the improvement of translation through AI, such a device may soon come to exist, and with it, the supposed end of languages as a valuable skill in life, and more particularly, in the office.
As the world becomes more and more connected, and most companies are dealing with multiple nationalities in one way or another, one would think that knowing a lot of languages would be a highly valued skill. But unfortunately, even without the aforementioned instant translation-earplugs, it is still pretty easy to get around the language barrier nowadays. Most people speak decent English, and AI can translate all of our emails, so why would a workplace value foreign languages as a skill?
Fortunately for us language-lovers, foreign languages as a skill are more attractive than ever on the job market; you just have to know how to market them.
