English requirements for employers
What you need to emphasize if you are learning a language to be successful in finding a job.
All 4 skills in language learning are important: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, you can develop them competently, focusing on things that employers will like and make you stand out from the crowd of job seekers. It is important to understand that a foreign language is not a goal, but a means to an end. Your goal determines how you should learn a foreign language and what you should work hard at. In this article we will tell you how to develop the most important skills for your career.
What do employers say?
According to a survey conducted by Cambridge, most employers emphasize two skills in particular: reading and speaking. Modern specialists have to read a lot: these are letters from colleagues and clients, professional literature, requirements of technical specifications, additional information from the Internet, job and product reviews. To cope with everything, you need to be able to read any text and pick out the main things from them. For those who work with people, the task is even more difficult: sometimes you have to catch the mood and needs of the writer from the text. You have to develop emotional intelligence in parallel with reading in order to read between the lines.
How do you develop reading for work?
Developing the skill of reading for a career is difficult, but doable. First, you have to practice a lot. It is worth reading a variety of texts every day: news, posts on social networks, fiction books and professional literature. Try to look for legal and technical documentation in English that is relevant to your work. By learning to understand such papers in advance, you will save time and money.
Secondly, you need to constantly replenish your vocabulary, and at the expense of words that are difficult for you. It often happens that a person reads a text, understands 90% of it, and guesses about the rest. You need to do the opposite: take apart these remaining incomprehensible words, learn their translation and meaning, write them down in the dictionary and constantly repeat. Progress is only possible where you make an effort. Don't be lazy to learn new things when you encounter them. Your diligence will pay off a hundredfold when you have an easy job and your salary is higher than that of your colleagues.
Third, learn to emphasize the main points in texts. To begin with, you can do this directly on paper, writing down the author's main thoughts. Try to make sure that such notes are not a brief paraphrase, but a squeeze of meanings. For example, a fiction text may have many characters who do many things. A condensed retelling of events may take many pages. But the main idea of the work is usually one. That's what the book was written for. You must be able to extract such ideas.
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