Demand for Language and Culture

Do employers value employees with language and culture skills?

Data come from a 2014 survey of U.S. employers in the government, for-profit, and not-for-profit sectors, in 49 states and DC.
Some of these results are reported in: “The demand for multilingual human capital in the U.S. labor market,” by Damari, Rivers, Brecht, Gardner, Pulupa, and Robinson (2017), published in Foreign Language Annals.

The Demand for Multilingual Human Capital in the U.S. Labor Market

The Demand for Multilingual Human Capital in the U.S. Labor Market

This article presents the findings of a 2014 survey of US employers on their requirements for multilingual employees. It identifies the employment sectors that were most likely to value multilingual workers, and it describes which skill sets were most coveted in conjunction with foreign language ability. The study also explains that even though a vast majority of employers wanted employees who can communicate effectively with people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, only 10 percent of responding employers reported requiring foreign-language skills in hiring.