Highest Paid Languages of 2017
At The Language Machine we like to encourage pupils to learn languages for love. Cold hard economics, though, can never be ignored so we we’re also quite interested to see which languages would end up earning you the most.
While most schools typically focus on French, German and Spanish research by job search portal Adzuna shows that it’s the more exotic languages that will rake in the cash when it comes to jobs. Job adverts for Japanese and Chinese language speakers had the highest advertised salaries at £32,355 and £31,119 respectively. Moreover demand for Japanese speakers has increased by 15.8% over the past year, while for Chinese speakers the equivalent figure is 22.5%.
Brexit Impact?
It’s quite possible that the vote to leave the EU had an impact on the results with German, which topped the poll last year, dropping to fourth place. Still with 8,154 vacancies German speakers still had the largest number of job opportunities — up 7.9% on a year ago. Russia also made it into the top 10 this time around.
With Brexit looming it seems that many companies are looking further afield to countries like China and Japan for new business opportunities.
Demand for Arabic Down
While Arabic speakers are relatively well paid, demand fell by a sharp 31.5% over the past year with just 856 role currently advertised across the UK.
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