The Power of Foreign Language in the Business World
— By Justin Schulberg, Excel 2017
“Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?” — Melina Marchetta.
The power of language is indisputable. Language has the ability to connect people. It allows people to share stories, to tell tales of the past and desires of the future. Without language, our ability to communicate would be near impossible.
I have seen that hundreds of my coworkers at Deloitte are passionate about foreign language, yet they have no way to use it in their work, let alone practice it regularly. Studying Mandarin and Spanish over the past years grew my interest in language, and it now translates into my involvement with Deloitte’s Language Initiative (DLI). The initiative has taken on a new shape since I joined and became the lead of the Spanish Language Table (SLT), one of six language tables under DLI that focuses on building employees’ skill-sets.
The SLT, similar to the other language tables, serves three main purposes:
- To provide an opportunity for language-oriented practitioners to strengthen their language skills
- To provide an opportunity for practitioners to network with a community of individuals with a shared culture and/or interest
- To identify practitioners that may serve as resources on internationally-oriented project work
Essentially, employees at the company use the language tables to come together, participate in an activity, and speak in the target language for an hour or so after work-hours. These language tables provide innumerable opportunities for their participants interested in that language.
Why does it matter?
A few of my colleagues have talked to me about how the rise of Natural Language Processing portends the elimination of the need for humans to study natural languages.
“If the programs we build in Python and R can, in real-time, process, analyze, and transmit natural language data, then why do we need humans to understand foreign languages? The hours it takes to master a foreign language is not worth the pay-off. Technology will handle translations.”
So, then, why spend all this time building out our foreign language skill-sets for the work place?
Deloitte works with many clients who only speak Spanish (foreign governments, non-profits/NGOs based in Spanish-speaking countries, etc.). There is a growing need in the work place to cater to a growing Spanish-speaking population, which according to U.S. Census Data “is projected to increase from 55 million in 2014 to 119 million in 2060, an increase of 115 percent.”[1] While some of these clients operate fully in Spanish, others value consultants who know their mother language. Often times, projects at client-facing companies will prefer bilingual candidates, anticipating they will forge stronger connections and working relationships with the clients. This desire for bilingual employees often leads companies to offer them monetary incentives. Research shows that knowing a foreign language correlates to a 2% increase in salary.[2] Assuming you start at a base salary of $60,000, work 40 years, and average a 3% raise per year, that translates to an additional $226,677 in salary at the end of your career. Put another way, knowing a foreign language means that at the end of your career, your salary will be, on average, 116% higher than a peer with all else held equal (someone check my math on this; I haven’t done compound interest in a while).[3]
What can I do?
If you are still in college, learn a new language. I started Mandarin my sophomore year and have been studying it for about four years now. All it takes is time (a lot of it, to be fair) and practice.
If you are already working and want to learn a language, take an adult night class. If you live in a big city, there are probably countless institutions and organizations that promote the learning of foreign languages. If you live in a smaller city, try to see if you can get a local institution, like the public library, to promote a foreign language community of sorts.
If you are already working and want to practice a language (i.e. shake off that rustiness), talk to a manager and see if they would be willing to support you in creating a community around that language. As an example, an event I led at Deloitte included having two Senior Managers, Nicole Fulgaro and Adriana Anderson, lead and fund a breakfast, all in Spanish, to talk about Spanish project opportunities at the company.
Another event we hosted was a Guacamole Cook-off, where me and my co-lead purchased all the ingredients, spices, and tableware, had a couple employees talk, in Spanish, about the nuances of Guacamole in their country of origin, and then had employees compete to see who could make the best Guacamole.
The primary school system in America has put a royalty on its youth learning languages other than English; foreign languages are mandatory to learn in most municipalities. Why let those skills that most of us have tucked away in some crevice of our memory fade away forever?
[1] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-1143.pdf
[2] http://freakonomics.com/media/p523.pdf
[3] 116% = 100*[(60000)(1+(.03+.02))⁴⁰ — (60000)(1+(.03)⁴⁰] / [(60000)(1+(.03)⁴⁰]
Justin Schulberg is a 2017 Birthright Israel Excel Fellow who interned at General Motors’ Advanced Technical Center. He graduated magna cum laude from Rutgers University, where he studied Mathematics & Political Science, with a minor in Spanish. He is currently working at Deloitte as a Business Technology Analyst in the DC federal government practice. At Deloitte, Justin has worked on data analytics and strategy projects with the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. When he is not working, you can usually find Justin playing soccer on the National Mall, studying Chinese, or reading. Justin is an advanced proficient Spanish speaker and an intermediate Mandarin speaker.
