Language training, or no training at all. The question is always the same one: how much does it cost me?

How much does a piece of machinery cost me, how much does one more employee cost me, or a new photocopier. And, on the other hand, how much does it cost me NOT to have it? How many jobs do I have to turn down if I don’t add machinery and staff? How much time do I waste in the business with just one photocopier, and the people who need it standing there, stuck in a queue?

European data on companies’ language skills

At least as far as the cost of missing language skills is concerned, we found an interesting figure, taken from a report commissioned by the European Union, which you can download here:

THE LANGUAGE GUIDE FOR EUROPEAN BUSINESSES (download)

Here it is, quoted directly:

“According to the ELAN study, among the almost 200 companies that had to forgo potential contracts because of a lack of foreign languages, 37 put the value of the lost contracts at between 8 million and 13.5 million euro. A further 54 companies had let contracts worth between 16.5 million and 25.3 million euro slip away, and ten companies contracts worth more than a million euro.”

The problem doesn’t only arise when nobody in a company knows a language at all. The more insidious risk is that a school-level command of the language leads to misunderstandings over the terms of commercial agreements, over requests, or to simple tension or strain in keeping communication at a level acceptable for business. Indeed, the report goes on:

“Cultural differences are another barrier linked to communication, and around one European company in five reports difficulty with them. And it is not only in remote regions of the world that companies encounter the greatest cultural differences: these can in fact emerge even in situations that seem most familiar to us. Doing business across Europe can in fact mean negotiating with hundreds of different national and regional cultures.”

The quality of the contacts and relationships you are able to build with international partners is very often a fundamental variable for how well the whole business performs.
That is why we strongly recommend taking a few minutes to read the whole report: alongside interesting data and considerations about European companies, you will also find virtuous case histories and practical advice for managing relationships abroad better. Some of it very simple too: is your website multilingual, for example? And does it cover, besides English, the languages of the countries you export to most?).

The report also talks about the ways you can acquire the language skills you need: for example, by relying on agents who handle certain countries on our behalf. Or by hiring staff who already know the language we’re interested in very well (or who are already studying it). Or, again, by setting up training programmes inside the company.

The Tuscan data

To get more up-to-date data specific to our own situation, though, we at European School commissioned an ad hoc survey of companies in the Tuscan area.

More than 800 Tuscan companies responded to the survey, representative of our area in terms of geographical spread, size and type of activity. All of them helped us better understand the relationship between our companies and the use of foreign languages, and the way they deal with the need to communicate abroad.

Here are some of the most significant results, which seem to fully confirm what direct experience had already suggested to us:

• More than 60% of the companies surveyed have dealings abroad. Those that don’t are mostly locally focused businesses that have no intention of expanding their operations beyond the border anyway.

• Trade with Europe predominates (France and Germany lead the way), followed by the United States. Trade with China also proves very significant, much less so with Russia – perhaps because contacts with Russia are limited to certain product sectors and certain types of company.

• To meet the need for staff who speak one or more foreign languages, companies hire employees who already have good language training. The percentage of companies that hire staff who are still in training is minimal, and even fewer plan in-house training initiatives.

While hiring already-trained staff undoubtedly has its advantages, it also has its own drawbacks that make it worth considering training plans, or at least language and cultural refresher courses.

For many reasons: for example, to make sure the level of language skills is genuinely adequate. Or to build a specialist vocabulary suited to the relevant sector on top of an already existing base skill.
Or, again, because the employee often has good language skills in the strict sense but knows too little about the culture the company deals with (and we have already seen that this is a particularly tricky situation).

For all these reasons, we encourage you to carefully weigh up both the costs and the benefits of a company training plan, comparing them with the costs and risks of leaving a valuable asset to the goodwill (or, more often, to the simple memory of school days) of your employees.

Lastly, in a market that is necessarily far more flexible than the one of just ten years ago, language training can be a very welcome benefit for employees, who see their personal skills grow and their standing within the company strengthened as a result: but we’ll go into that in more depth in a future article!

Want to know more about corporate language training? Request information.