Lack of language skills predicted to worsen UK youth unemployment

International Business Times reported that according to All Languages, language and interpretation specialist, the latest set of Ucas figures, which show a 5% drop in modern language applications despite the overall number of students applying for university places rising, will only worsen UK unemployment and exacerbate tougher competition for graduate positions due to the lack of language skills. Commenting on the challenges of recruiting multilingual professionals, Mark Nesbit, managing consultant at specialist procurement, buying, supply chain and logistics recruitment company CAST UK, said: “Our procurement team has direct experience in recruiting multilingual candidates for international companies with operations across the globe. Having successfully completed recruitment campaigns on behalf of many leading multinationals, we have also delivered recruitment solutions to those organisations consolidating procurement functions into centralised hubs here in the UK. “Recruiting professionals with business-level linguistics to effectively manage a European supplier base is challenging as this is a rare profile for UK candidates. To tackle this, our team of consultants possess both operational procurement experience as well as fluency in a variety of languages including Spanish, French, Italian and German. “This means that we are capable of conducting language skills test on behalf of our clients, which is invaluable when accelerating recruitment processes. Given Ucas and All Languages’ concerns around the future of multilingual UK graduates, I think that as long as recruiters, like ourselves, have the systems and teams in place to effectively manage language-based recruitment, international candidates will continue to fill the growing language skills gap.”