With language skills, we can gain a significant competitive advantage on the labor market

Today, there is almost no profession where language skills are not required, or at least where it does not contribute to the success of our activities, broadens either our client base or the possibilities of our work location. English is currently one of the most widely used languages on Earth. According to statistics, there are 446 million native speakers today, 650 million who speak it well as a first or second language, and 2-3 billion who understand a few words of English. It is also one of the official and working languages of the European Union, as well as the most widespread computer language.

"We are experiencing that more and more people are waking up to the fact that they want to step out of their limitations and wish to live, move and work more freely, whether in Hungary or anywhere in the world. People from a wide variety of professions come to our English language courses, specifically with the ultimate goal of being able to earn more money by improving their language skills," informed Péter Dunay, Speak! Professional manager of a language school, creator of Dunay's 100% speech, 0% book method.

The world opens up

It can be observed that the problem is usually not caused by the knowledge of professional words, since in most cases the students acquire those roughly 200-300 words during specialized training. The problems affect the field of everyday communication much more, since if there are deficiencies here, the kind of dialogue that could contribute to customer acquisition cannot develop.

"Many people decide to continue their lives elsewhere, or live a double life and commute between Hungary and the country of their choice. We often meet, for example, tattoo artists who work in England for one half of the month and at home for the other half, but our students also include a large number of healthcare workers, caterers, representatives of the beauty industry and IT professionals," we learned from Péter Dunay.

In addition to the fact that you don't need paper, you also need to know the language!

In the last two and a half years, as a result of the language exam moratoriums introduced due to Covid, more than 100,000 people received their diploma without having to take a language exam. Moreover, according to the plans, the government will completely phase out the system of the compulsory language exam, in the future, instead of requiring a language exam, higher education institutions must provide the opportunity to acquire the appropriate language competences during training, and they will be given the right to decide on their own authority whether the language exam is necessary for the diploma .

"Despite the fact that this may seem like a relief to many, it is important to know that this by no means means that language skills will be less necessary to fill jobs. For employers, the point was not the paper, but the actual knowledge, and this will presumably be more the case in the future. Knowledge of the English language can play a decisive role between two applicants with similar professional skills, and in a given position, the one who speaks the language can earn more than 30% more," emphasized Speak! Professional manager of a language school.

He who speaks a language has information and knowledge

In the world, the amount of knowledge and information is increasing to an incredible extent, only a fraction of which is available in Hungarian, but almost everything is available in English. Those who are not able to absorb and process these will soon realize that they are irretrievably left behind.

"Without knowing the English language, we can feel that we are missing out on a lot of things in the field of culture, because it is not in the economic interest of program producers and distributors to translate everything into Hungarian. More and more content will be available only in foreign languages, which we will not have the opportunity to learn about," Péter Dunay added.

The expert also drew attention to the fact that our lives can be more efficient with language skills. If we speak Hungarian, we can communicate with roughly 15-20 million people in the world, but if we also speak English, then this circle expands to roughly one billion.

"Language knowledge is no longer an extra skill, but increasingly a basic requirement. So much so that on Wikipedia, under the functional illiteracy article, we can read the following: the affected person can read and write, but very poorly. He spells out the words but can't understand the instruction manual and can't read for his own pleasure. This hinders further learning. In Hungary, according to various estimates, 16-33% of adults are functionally illiterate. According to some opinions, the definition should be expanded with the following: a functional illiterate is also someone who does not speak languages or does not have a driver's license," quoted the creator of Dunay's 100% speech, 0% book method.

(Source: marmalade.co.hu; hirado.hu | Image: pixabay.com)