How Learning a Second Language Boosted My Career Opportunities

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Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. One subject that comes up all the time is if I learn these languages, what can I do with it? You know, the relationship between languages and work or a career, a profession and so forth. Okay, I want to talk a bit about that with reference to my own personal experience. First of all, a general statement…

I am not aware of a lot of professions where you can say hire me because I speak a lot of languages. There are some. Obviously, if you are an interpreter, a translator, a teacher of languages, then I speak a lot of languages might get you a job. In most cases, what I’ve found with speaking languages was that it increased the opportunities that are going to come your way, but you still have to have other things working for you. You have to have other skills, knowledge of a specific sector or market, the ability to do business, the ability to be a reliable, energetic person in any number of fields.

In my own case, for example, there’s no question that the fact that I left Montreal as an Anglophone, went to France, studied there for three years -- the last two were at [Insert French] in Paris [Insert French] -- then I wrote my Canadian Diplomatic or Foreign Service Exam in French as an Anglophone. I am sure that helped me be selected into the Canadian Diplomatic Service, so here’s a profession where languages count. They want people who are fluent, at the very least, in the two official languages. If an Anglophone wrote the Foreign Service Exam in French, that probably put me in a select group so I had a better chance of being selected. That was the first thing.

When I was in Ottawa in my year-end training with the Trade Commissioner Service and I heard that the government was preparing to send someone to learn Chinese, I started taking Chinese lessons on my own so that I could go to the director of personnel and say I hear you want to send someone to learn Chinese because Canada is about to recognize the People’s Republic of China. I’ve already started; I just want you to know that.

So the fact that I have already undertaken to start learning Chinese makes them probably think why wouldn’t we choose him? He’s already motivated. So that helped. Obviously, learning Chinese then I was able to go into China and help Canadian businesspeople who were negotiating with their Chinese counterparts in different situations at the Canton Trade Fair and so forth.

I subsequently went to Japan, lived there and learned Japanese. Because I learned Japanese quite quickly, on my own I should add, and had a lot of contacts in the forest product sector while working at the Embassy, a Canadian company that wanted to set up their own office in Japan saw someone, me, although quite young at the time, who had contacts in the industry and who spoke Japanese, so I was given the job of setting up their representative subsidiary in Tokyo. Obviously, my knowledge of Japanese not only enabled me to communicate at various levels in the Japanese lumber trade sector and not just those trading company people who spoke English, but a wide variety of people. So I got that job. I subsequently went back to Japan for another company, again, because I spoke Japanese and had contacts.

I guess the next major sort of language-learning spurt for me was 1987. I was between jobs, I had been hired by a company that did business in Europe and I said I’m going to really learn up German. So I spent a month scouring the secondhand bookstores in Vancouver finding books that had text and vocabulary lists for each chapter because I just didn’t want to look every word up in the dictionary. There were no online dictionaries, no LingQ, so I found a whole pile of excellent books in German and some good audio cassettes for learning German and did a lot of listening and reading and learned of German.

Well, it turned out that in the 1990s I did a fair amount of business in Germany. We were selling wood from Canada into Germany and so I had visitors from Germany and I traveled in Germany. Once you got past the main sort of lumber agents, a lot of the consumers, the wood processors, the different customers for our products were much more comfortable speaking German than speaking English. I think it helped me do business there.

Thereafter, we started doing business in Sweden, which became a big supplying country for us and so I again got after Swedish, which I had some background in because I was born there and lived there for five years.