A new study has revealed that students lacking in language skills will miss out on jobs.
The research by the ATC’s academic partners at the University of Portsmouth reveals that languages continue to be very much in demand in the UK’s job market, across every industry sector.
A recent study by language learning platform Preply supports this finding. Utilising salaries advertised on LinkedIn and Glassdoor, the team were able to identify that jobs requiring employees to be bilingual tend to pay more than jobs that do not.
A striking finding from their research is that UK Au Pairs (with an average annual salary of £39,000) earn even more than people working within the accountancy and banking sectors (who earn £37,975 on average, with no second language required) and people with engineering jobs (who earn £35,644 on average).
Let’s take a look at the wider results below…
Top paying bilingual jobs
- International Sales Manager – £50,400
- Product Localisation Manager – £41,218
- Au Pair – £39,000
- Foreign Language Teacher – £35,121
- Hotel Manager – £31,714
- Interpreter – £30,500
- Translator – £27,993
- Foreign Service Officer – £27,461
- Study Abroad Coordinator – £26,823
- Field Researcher – £26,751
The highest-paying bilingual job on the list was an international sales manager, with an average UK salary of £50,400. The team discovered that there were 143,000 employees that fell into this job sector on LinkedIn alone, compared to the highest paying job on the list (science and pharmaceuticals) with only 6,800 workers.
It is interesting to note that international sales managers in the UK earn almost as much as lawyers do, as a law-related salary was revealed to be £51,446 – possibly due to the sales manager role requiring a second language.
Neither the finance nor engineering sector specifies the need for a second language, once again drawing a contrast towards being bilingual leading to more wealth and success at work.
To further investigate the correlation between language and wealth, the team at Preply also drew results from what percentage of the world’s richest people are bilingual and the way countries speak about the future.
