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Employer Quotes
The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Engineering
They are talking about this topic: Occupation-Specific Skills
The quotes below are about this issue:
With more firms doing international work, candidates with international experiences are an asset. This includes travel experiences, fluency in other languages, and cultural sensitivity.
| "Right now, we're seeing a need for Spanish for the most part. But then we're getting into Malaysia and Brazil, and there are so many dialects, and it can be very difficult. I worked with a company last year who needed an accountant based in the U.S. who spoke Portuguese because they had bought plants in Brazil. But they wanted a Portuguese fluent person here in Minnesota to communicate with the plant in Brazil. Language skills are going to be more and more important as we become more international for sure. We were trying to find a person more on the sales side. And we're going to Europe, so the person we will want to hire will depend on where we end up going. We're doing some things in Brazil, too. It's like, okay, Portuguese. Mexico is not a big market for us, so Spanish is less important. But to go into Canada and to speak some French would really be good. We have one engineer now that speaks French, but it would be nice to have somebody else." |
Northwest |
| "I guess we need somebody that takes a history class and wants to learn about other parts of the world. I'm just amazed at how some people have not really been outside of their core area. To see what is happening in the rest of the world gives people a broader perspective. That's real critical for an engineer to have access to. About 26 percent of our sales are outside of the U.S. Canada is a big chunk of it." | Northwest |
| "We've been in Canada for a while, but just in the last two years is when we've been starting to branch into other countries beyond Canada. I don't know the percentage. But it is new territory for us to start dealing with other countries." | Northwest |
| "Right now, we are pretty much just in the U.S. The European markets are very attractive to us just because of the growth potential, but right now we are solely here." | Northwest |
| "Being multilingual, we've started to put that on the project manager job description because they are the ones having most of the communication with the customer. But, if our engineers have that, most definitely that would be good because we are becoming more and more international." | Northwest |