Linguistic skills required by portuguese employers in the past 40 years: the case of office management professionals
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29352/mill024e.18033Keywords:
Languages, job advertisements, skills, secretarial/office management positionsAbstract
Introduction: With internationalisation and globalisation, language skills are increasingly useful in today’s labour market, especially in functions that require contacts with other markets, such as secretarial/management support positions.
Objectives: Identify and analyse the language skills required in job advertisements for secretarial/office management professionals.
Methods: Study of 844 job advertisements for secretarial/office management positions, published in the newspaper Jornal Expresso (1978-2018), in March. Possible requirements for language skills used in each advertisement were examined. The collected data were studied globally and in terms of temporal evolution.
Results: 78.8% of the analysed advertisements have language requirements, predominating those in which two languages are requested. The most requested foreign languages are English and French. In 67.2% of the references, there is an explicit mention of oral/written competencies. There is a great diversity of formulations referring to the level of proficiency sought, prevailing the requests for “mastery” in the cases of English, French and German, and “knowledge/satisfactory knowledge” for Spanish.
Conclusions: Language skills are essential for secretarial/office management professionals. They must have a good knowledge of
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