English is the language of business. There is a common, well-founded, perception that knowing English gets you jobs easily and opens up more opportunities. A study by Cambridge English and QS survey showed that good English skills can lead to faster progression through job grades and higher salary increases. BLoC spoke to Arunachalam TK, Regional Director, South Asia, for Cambridge Assessment English, to find out more about the importance of language skills.
Artificial intelligence has become an integral part of workplaces today, and its importance will only grow in the coming years. What impact will this have on English and communication?
The Cambridge English Qualifications have six levels — A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2, with C2 being the highest level. Now, at the lower levels — A1 and A2 — where you’re only giving instructions or where you’re expected to convey routine messages, they can all be done autonomously.
But as you move up from B2 to C2, you have to pass on something called higher-order skills. This is where you need to possess personal skills, negotiation skills and contract management. Employers would want their staff to demonstrate these higher-order skills.
Currently, they’re happy if you just speak in English. But in the future, they will want you to demonstrate that you have negotiation and conflict management skills. If you look at the profile of the UN report of work skills required, of the 20 they put out, about 15 involve higher-order communication skills.
We’ve all heard that language skills help attain better job opportunities. Could you give us an example?
A study jointly conducted by Cambridge English & QS, ‘English at Work: global analysis of language skills in the workplace’, shows that knowing English can give you a huge advantage in terms of compensation. The report found that 38 per cent of employers offer better packages to applicants with good English skills, which could mean faster job progress!
Our medium of instruction in higher education institutes, be it B-schools or engineering colleges, is English. So, if I am Tamil medium school student joining engineering, I’m trying to cope because instruction is in a language I’m not comfortable with. It involves a lot of memorising to pass an exam.
If they have, say, an English language foundation course at that level, where one can learn English, they can then spend the rest of their engineering years learning the subject better. Learning skills in English are quite important in India. It’s underrated because students who come from the regional language medium are at a huge disadvantage.
English is a global language of business, but countries like Japan and Korea conduct business in their own language and are quite successful. Would you say these are aberrations?
When it is global business, say, between Indian and Chinese companies, contracts are not signed in Chinese. They are signed in English.
So English still has a lot of currency. Every language has a life-cycle. There are periods when it is used for commerce, and times when it is used by the elite. Even in India, we moved from Sanskrit to Prakrit to Pali and right now, Hindi.
It appears that English is at a space in its cycle where it is predominantly used and this is only aided by social media. In the next 15-20 years, we see a strong push for globalisation where English plays a leading role.
But that’s where Indian languages have a lot of opportunity as well. For example, when someone comes to Tamil Nadu to learn Tamil, there is no proper infrastructure to learn the language. We don’t have a structure that can help us learn Indian languages, though one needs to preserve them. Just as we have English for schools, higher education and business, there could be something like this for Tamil too.
We’re trying to reach out to governments to say, ‘Can we have a structure, make it possible for someone to learn Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam in a bit more accessible way?’ That way, schools and businesses can say if you’re from some other part of India and you’re working in TN, then you need to know level B2 of Tamil. It could appear quite parochial, but if we have a standard, transparent and democratic way where people can learn a language, they would.
You see boards advertising that Spoken Hindi and Spoken English are taught here or there, but not one board says Spoken Tamil. Ideally, it should be the other way round. When you go to the US or the UK, you learn English. You don’t expect them to learn Hindi or Tamil. If we have the infrastructure to make language learning accessible, many more job opportunities could open up too.