Linguistic skills required by portuguese employers in the past 40 years: the case of office management professionals

• Autor(a) principal: Ribeiro, Sílvia
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Calvão, Ana Rita, Simões, Anabela Valente
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/33275
• topic: Languages; Job advertisements; Skills; Secretarial/office management positions

Introduction: With internationalization and globalization, 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 ads 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 data was studied globally and in terms of temporal evolution. Results: 78.8% of the analysed advertisements have language requirements, predominating those in which 2 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 or written competencies. There is a great diversity of formulations referring to the level of proficiency sought, prevailing the requests for “domain” in the cases of English, French and German, and “satisfactory knowledge/knowledge” for Spanish. Conclusion: Language skills are essential for secretarial/office management professionals. They must have a good knowledge of their mother tongue, as well as of at least two foreign languages in which they must demonstrate good levels of proficiency.