3 Main Advantages of Language Training in Upskilling and Reskilling

As the global workplace now experiences a talent shortage, the best strategy is to create viable candidates rather than attract talent. This means that training managers and headhunters are all vying for talent to expand their internal talent pools. One great way to deal with this is to implement effective upskilling and reskilling programs.

Udemy for Business reports that more and more organizations are now making efforts in improving their workforce’s business communication skills. More than the necessity to achieve better collaborations within and among teams, companies seek to develop their workforces’ ability to build meaningful business relationships with their colleagues, customers, and clients abroad which require them to learn the languages of people they usually work with.

And this calls for more language training opportunities for employees!

In today’s multinational workplace, language learning is more than just a means to gain language skills. More than this, it should also be relevant to a learner’s current job role, industry, and other skills they’re trying to acquire. This means that the demand for better communication is only one of the things that language training for employees can address.

To better understand, it’s best to know how CLIL works. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) involves learning different subject areas through a foreign language which has two goals — (1) learning a particular skill or competency, and (2) acquiring foreign language competency. These are done simultaneously.

What’s more interesting with CLIL is that it organizes learning into meaningful content. So for instance, your salesperson needs to better manage negotiations with foreign clients. They can learn a target language while also honing their presentation and negotiation skills in that specific language.

Aside from this, learners can get a lot of benefits from corporate language training. Here are the main advantages of language learning not only in upskilling your employees, but also reskilling them for a future-proof professional growth:

Improves employee confidence and productivity

Equipping your employees with language skills that are focused on their respective job roles and industries can definitely improve their communicative confidence. And surely, having the confidence to communicate and share insights and ideas will let them perform better within their teams.

Likewise, as organizations become more globalized, employees also interact and collaborate with international colleagues more often. So equipping your employees with necessary language and communication skills allow for less miscommunication that can result in less inefficiencies as well. Ultimately, this also results in more productivity within your organization.

To better realize how language training comes into play, for example, organizations partner with goFLUENT to help their employees acquire language skills — verbal communication, language comprehension, and written communication — that are useful for their employees’ current job roles.

For instance, a scientist is having a hard time understanding documents and presentations that are mostly written and presented in English. Having the language skills focused on the learner’s industry is necessary not just to help them learn English but also to perform better in their job role as they deal with scientific journals and other important documents.

So this can result in more language confidence and competence that can highly affect the productivity and performance of your employees.

Targets soft and future-forward skills

With the CLIL approach, upskilling employees through corporate language training doesn’t only focus on basic communication skills, but it also considers how a learner can gain another specific skill using the foreign language as the language of instruction (and learning).

As an example, in the goFLUENT learning portal, language learning content is categorized according to job and industries (e.g. Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals & Healthcare, Retail) that increases the relevance of learning a second language.

Learn more about how you can provide your learners with a hyper-personalized and adaptive learning experience.

With the vast collection of language learning resources, learners can explore different language training lessons and courses that are relevant to their respective industries which can help them upskill better and more effectively.

Not only this, but they can also develop  future-forward skills that can come in handy in the present or more so, in the future. For one, they can be better communicators and increase their competency in doing current tasks in their roles.

Widens internal promotion opportunities

Reskilling your workforce by providing them with language training that’s tailored to their job, industry, and learning styles can make your employees more promotable.

For instance, you can offer your employees language learning that’s  business-focused like goFLUENT’s solutions that include language lessons zeroing in on professional skills like business writing, leadership, managing meetings and negotiations, presentations, cross-cultural communication, and such specific topics.

As a result, this can equip your employees with the right communication skills to conquer different scenarios within their current jobs or in future roles they might want to pursue.

Aside from this, employees that can communicate in more than one language also have a higher chance to become expatriates, which can also help them grow professionally and help them broaden their career horizon.

In conclusion, widening internal promotion opportunities among your employees allows for more internal mobility within your organization; thus, it can help you diversify and further develop your internal talent pool.

The Bottomline

The thing is that as more and more organizations find value in cultivating their employees’ language and business communication skills to further develop in today’s ever-changing world of work, upskilling and reskilling programs that focus on language training are crucial to achieving more efficient work collaboration and work dynamics that can further elevate your company’s productivity.