How to Highlight Your Language Skills to Get Noticed

close up of person holding a resume

If you are proficient in more than one language, you possess a highly marketable skill. Do you know which languages are most marketable? According to Preply, the three most frequently requested languages in job postings are Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), and French.

Consider this: As of May 15, 2022, Indeed has posted over 900 jobs in the U.S. with the keywords multilingual speaker. Just over a year ago, Indeed also posted an article on the 13 Best Careers for Multilingual Professionals.

Learning another language is a skill that requires dedication and commitment. In addition, those who are bilingual and multilingual are known to be better multitaskers and problem solvers—qualities you want to make known while job hunting.

Achieving a level of expertise in another language is impressive and should definitely be highlighted even if you’re not looking for a job where a second language is required.

Here are three suggestions for how to highlight and showcase your language skills to get noticed.

Make your language skills visible everywhere

Your resume is the first place where you should put your language skills. To make sure that these special skills are noticed, consider including them both in the skills section and the summary. As recruiters often only skim resumes, including your language skills on top of your resume will increase your chances of getting noticed. LinkedIn is another place where you should highlight your language skills. If a job application process also requires a cover letter, be sure you mention your language skills in there, too. Many companies are looking to expand globally in the near future, so even if language skills aren’t required for the job, being proficient will certainly make you a stronger candidate.

Be clear about your language proficiency

Many candidates include phrases such as “Fluent in . . .,” “Conversant in . . .”, or “Working knowledge of . . .” on resumes. Language fluency is hard to gauge, and your perception of your proficiency might not match what your true proficiency is when measured with a language proficiency assessment. It’s easy to overstate one’s proficiency. A recent survey has shown that nearly 60% of job applicants overstate their abilities on their resumes, including their language proficiency.

If you possess language skills, consider obtaining an official language proficiency certificate by taking a language assessment, such as the ACTFL language proficiency tests. An ACTFL test not only tells you exactly what your proficiency level is, but it also comes with an official certification that lets your prospective employer know exactly how well you can communicate in another language. The ACTFL assessments also come with digital badges issued by Credly, which makes showcasing your language skills on your resume and professional networking sites easier.

Be specific with your examples

Have you used your language skills in professional settings before? Talk about it! Instead of simply stating that you command another language, give specific examples of how you used them. Having a few concrete examples of how you incorporated your language skills into your work shows the hiring manager a level of ability in addition to just showing them your proficiency level. Another idea: post videos of yourself speaking or presenting in another language on your professional network such as LinkedIn. Recruiters searching for candidates will immediately notice them… and your language skills, too!

You might be proficient, but be prepared for a test

According to a recent ACTFL report titled, “Making Languages Our Business: Addressing Foreign Language Demands Among U.S. Employers,” 9 out 10 employers rely on language skills other than English to conduct their business, and this demand is expected to increase by 56% in the next 5 years. Client- and community-facing departments, such as Customer Services, Sales, Marketing, Management, and IT have the greatest need. Therefore, employers who rely on bilingual and multilingual employees need to have a reliable and validated method of checking job candidates’ language abilities. Validated and certified language proficiency testing offers an accurate measurement of language level, so more and more employers include language assessment as part of their recruitment process. If you haven’t taken a language proficiency assessment and don’t have a language proficiency certificate, you might be asked to sit for a test as part of your interview process.

Want to get certified? You can start here.

An Incentive to Stay: Employer-Sponsored Education and Certifications

collage of portraits of diverse group of people

In today’s hiring environment it’s very difficult to compete…as an employer. The unemployment rate is at an all-time low, and the lived experiences of working-class adults in the U.S. during the pandemic made many reconsider what they valued (or not) about their workplace culture.  Employers across all industries are now challenged with mitigating the demands for mindfulness, empathy, and creating a sense of purpose for their employees. Loyalty and staff retention is tied to the experience new hires have during the talent acquisition process, onboarding, and in their day-to-day circumstances at work. They want to find value in the work they are performing and feel that their employers care about them.

Recognizing the contributions of people while they are in the workplace and providing enrichment opportunities through training and employer-sponsored education are easy ways to boost morale and elevate the skills of your employees. Employers have always been able to facilitate these growth opportunities. Upskilling internal teams can ignite more productivity. It also helps build an organizational culture that seeks to invest in improving people to grow business not only in the U.S., but globally. It’s part of humanizing how we do business moving forward.

One often-missed business opportunity is tapping into an ever-growing pool of multicultural and multilingual professionals that are part of the U.S. workforce. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2020 one in every three adults in the U.S. workforce identifies as being part of a non-White ethnic or cultural group, and these diverse communities are not monolithic. The Black community can have representation from people who identify as African American, Caribbean, and African. As for people of Asian descent participating in the U.S. workforce, the demographic make-up is comprised of people who identify as Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Pakistani, Cambodian, Hmong, and others. People of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity can be of any race and represent 18 percent of the total labor force. This poses diversity in thought, approach, perspectives, innovation, and skills such as bilingualism or multilingualism. It also reflects diversity in new or repeat customers.

Many companies have adopted education coverage as a formal way to engage with their employees and helping them earn degrees that can be beneficial for business growth and expansion into global markets. For example, JetBlue Global Scholars Program offers the airline’s crewmembers the opportunity to earn a fully accredited associate or bachelor’s degree that includes major cost coverage, required licenses, certifications, transfer course credits, as well as job experiences and JetBlue training.

JetBlue also allows its multilingual employees to earn college credits by demonstrating proficiency in other known languages. JetBlue employees can take ACTFL language proficiency assessments in speaking, writing, listening, and reading and receive an official ACTFL language proficiency certificate for each test. Five of ACTFL assessments, which are conducted by Language Testing International, are recognized by the American Council on Education (ACE) for college credit. This affords bilingual or multilingual JetBlue crewmembers the chance to earn as many as 12 college credits per assessment, advancing their education and work opportunities as well. Many graduates are promoted to assume new roles within the company or qualify for more flight routes as a direct result of their language certification and their degree, thanks to the JetBlue Global Scholars Program.

Read more –> Business Benefits of Multilingualism

As word gets around among job seekers and workers looking for better employment opportunities where they will be incentivized for the skills they bring to the table – including proficiency in other languages – employers are pressed to identify, cultivate,

and provide opportunities for higher education and/or certification to their employees. They, in turn, will benefit from increasing employee satisfaction and loyalty, recognition as a mindful and supportive employer, and broadening of their market share by reaching multicultural customers using the language proficiency of their team.

Are you interested in language proficiency assessment as part of your employer-sponsored education opportunities? Learn more here and contact us to get started.

We did the test. Now what? Part 1: Looking at yearly performance over time

two teenage girls doing school work

We love to use the AAPPL test for our students to earn the Seal of Biliteracy, but to refine our program and to recognize growth as well as achievement, we have explored the data reporting tools that the LTI Client Site has to offer. In this article, I will discuss a few of the ways that you can use this data as evidence to differentiate instruction, change curricular focus, and even to supplement your teacher evaluation rating. While some of the data analysis can be done directly within the LTI Client Site, you can also export student data to do a deeper dive using a spreadsheet.

One of the key ways that you can use the data is for longitudinal comparison of your students’ performance versus their own prior performance; you can also look at performance in your current year and previous years. Below I will demonstrate a few examples of how you can do this, as well as a breakdown of what our thought process around this information has looked like for our district specifically.

Refine Your Year Over Year Performance

For this example, I will produce tables for each of the four years that we have given the Spanish-language AAPPL, with a comparison of juniors and seniors. (We test during Seal of Biliteracy eligibility, which in Ohio is within 15 months of graduation.) Then I will repeat this for myself as a teacher and compare my students’ results to our school’s overall results.

  1. From the Main Menu, click AAPPL School Report.
  2. Select your date range, Language, Teacher, and
  3.  the value that you wish to Compare By followed by your selected parameters.
  4. Click Apply Filters to see your data.

using the Client Site

Digging in: Performance by Grade Over Years

Taking the filters I just set, I’ll first look at performance by grade, starting in 2019. The following images show AAPPL Data for Spanish students in grades 11 and 12 by year, starting in 2019.

Spanish Students: Performance by Grade 2019
Figure 1. Spanish Students: Performance by Grade 2019

In Figure 1, you can see that the 11th and 12th graders are hovering in the intermediate range, with the exception of the ILS where the 11th graders had a notably lower average rating.

Spanish Students: Performance by Grade 2020
Figure 2. Spanish Students: Performance by Grade 2020

A year later, in 2020 (Figure 2), I see that the grade 11 students are achieving a higher average rating on the ILS than the previous year, now nearing I3 instead of N3. I also see that, overall, both 11th and 12th graders are achieving higher ratings than the previous year.

Spanish Students: Performance by Grade 2021
Figure 3. Spanish Students: Performance by Grade 2021

In 2021 (Figure 3), I can see lower average scores across the board and can consider what was different in this academic year from previous years.

Figure 4. Spanish Students: Performance by Grade 2022 (to date; some tests are still in progress)

I again see evidence of lower average scores across the board in 2022 (Figure 4).

Spanish Students: Performance by Grade (Combined 2019-2022)
Figure 5. Spanish Students: Performance by Grade (Combined 2019-2022)

Figure 5 shows combined scores for all three years and allows me to get an overall snapshot of my 11th and 12 grade students over a period of time. I can compare this combined score over 3 years to any individual year, and I’ve now created my own norm-referenced internal benchmark.

This simple example of looking at students by grade over a series of years gives a glimpse into how useful longitudinal reporting can be. In my next post, I’ll dig into some analysis as I do a year over year comparison using the longitudinal data.

The Insurance Industry Welcomes Your Fluency in Two or More Languages

insurance agent talking to a couple

If you are a bilingual or multilingual individual looking for a job, there is an industry looking for you! You could be an incredible asset for any of the many insurance companies in the United States. The demand for people with language skills among small-, medium-, and large-scale employers in competitive business environments such as the insurance industry is in high-demand and will continue to rise.

According to a 2018 survey conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs for ACTFL, most employers are reporting more demand for language skills than in previous years. One of the most striking findings was that “nine out of 10 U.S. employers report a reliance on U.S.-based employees with language skills other than English, with one-third (32 percent) reporting a high dependency.” (Page 3, para. 2).

The U.S. marketplace and its workforce are more culturally diverse than ever before. Statistics show that 65 million people that live in the U.S. speak a language other than English, which suggests that employers are frequently dealing with customers, suppliers, or collaborators with different cultural backgrounds and limited English proficiency. This report also points out that the languages in highest demand among employers in the U.S. are Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), French, Japanese, German, Russian, Arabic, Italian, Korean, Hindi, and Portuguese.

Every day the consumer marketplace is becoming more multilingual and multicultural. Every day more employers are acknowledging the need to address the demand for language skills—especially in businesses where direct communication with customers is fundamental to company revenue growth. The ACTFL survey states that the top two departments in businesses that require employees with valued language skills are customer service and sales. Research shows that the insurance market is an industry that is constantly innovating to satisfy the evolving demands of engaging customers that do not fully command English. It is a challenge for individuals with limited English proficiency to fully understand the details of insurance plans and claims, which could obstruct the progress of a business interaction. As a policy holder, whether it’s home, life, health, automobile, or disability insurance, one expects to get the best offer as well as a quality experience that is generally evaluated based on good communication. For this reason, insurance employers must ensure their agents are capable of delivering sensitive information in a clear and accurate manner to their customers, since miscommunication could lead to losing a sale or end up in a legal problem, among other possibly serious consequences. Additionally, the probability of buying a product increases if the company provides customer support in the customer’s preferred language.

Watch –> Leading with Understanding: Bilingual Insurance Agents Build Strong Working Relationships

If you are bilingual or multilingual, the insurance industry can benefit from your language versatility, and the possibilities for your professional growth are exponentially greater if you use your skills correctly. There are many benefits in the job market for bilingual employees. Bilingualism increases your chances of being hired for an insurance company that does business internationally or with a dedicated department for multicultural consumer engagement, decreasing competition for crucial job roles. Some advantages that come with being bilingual include the opportunity to travel to different locations around the world, the ability to connect on a more personal level with clients that may not command English, and the development of long-lasting business relations. Additionally, your pay rate or salary may grow significantly since you may qualify for different roles in your organization, or you can consider switching companies to increase your income. There are many players in the insurance market! The potential to be successful by utilizing your language skills to advance in your career is limitless. Multilingual people get higher scores on memory tests and are better observers than their monolingual colleagues; these are sought-after qualities in professions within the insurance arena that require employees to juggle conveying detailed information and managing the diverse needs of families and individuals with ease.

If you are a bilingual and enthusiastic professional seeking to become a valued asset to the insurance industry and would like to get certified, contact Language Testing International (LTI). As an exclusive licensee of ACTFL, LTI offers valid and reliable language proficiency assessments and certifications in over 120 languages. An official language certificate also comes with a digital badge issued by Credly that you can display on your resume and on professional networks such as LinkedIn.

Resources:

“Reducing the Impact of Language Barriers”. Forbes Insights. https://images.forbes.com/forbesinsights/StudyPDFs/Rosetta_Stone_Report.pdf

“Survey of 8,709 Consumers in 29 Countries Finds that 76% Prefer Purchasing Products with Information in their Own Language.” CSA Research. https://csa-research.com/Blogs-Events/CSA-in-the-Media/Press-Releases/Consumers-Prefer-their-Own-Language

“Bilingual employees can earn more money per hour than those who speak one language.” Financial Post. https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/business-essentials/bilingual-employees-can-earn-more-money-per-hour-than-those-who-speak-one-language