Report: Job Market Is Strong for Bilingual Workers

On the heels of a report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences urging a national strategy to boost language learning capacity, the New American Economy today released a paper emphasizing the critical need for language skills in the workplace. The bipartisan group of some 500 pro-immigration reform mayors and business leaders’ new report, “Not Lost in Translation: The Growing Importance of Foreign Language Skills in the U.S. Job Market,” says that the number of jobs aimed at bilingual workers more than doubled from 2010 to 2015, to 630,000. Employers added jobs for bilingual workers over that period at a significantly higher rate than they did for the general worker population, according to the report, and speakers of Chinese, Spanish and Arabic are increasingly in demand. Bilingual workers are desired in both low- and high-skill jobs, and sectors such as banking and healthcare are particularly in need of employees who speak a language other than English. Relatedly, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages is leading a new campaign, Lead with Languages, to reverse the U.S. language skills gap and promote language learning.