Good knowledge of English is a recruitment criterion for many employers
This is also confirmed by another study by the job exchange reported by the GQ magazine: According to this, 18 percent of all jobs in Germany require good foreign language skills, with a full 93.1 percent of employers in these professional fields even citing a good level of English as a prerequisite for hiring. This means that English is (still) clearly the most important foreign language on the labor market in this country – and not, as some forecasts in the past have suggested, Mandarin.
After all, 2.9 percent of employers in sectors in which foreign language skills are required require knowledge of French, and 1.2 percent of employers in Spanish. It is followed by Italian (0.9 percent), Russian and Polish (0.5 percent each).
Employers in Germany appreciate knowledge of languages spoken within Europe
The study shows that employers in Germany are currently particularly keen on employees who understand and, ideally, speak English and one or more of the national languages of our neighboring countries. This matches the result of the older study from 2018, in which 56 percent of those surveyed stated that they primarily use their foreign language skills to communicate with customers: After all, the majority of German companies tend to have customers in other European countries than in countries further away.
Incidentally, the same also applies to the neighboring countries – so if you are looking for a job in other European countries, you can probably score points with German as your mother tongue.
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