There is a mismatch between business demand and education supply. The UK workforce suffers from a chronic shortage of people at all levels with usable language skills, but this is especially problematic in frontline roles. Companies need personnel with technical or professional knowledge plus another language. There is strong evidence that commercial employers are recruiting abroad. Employees from the UK are therefore increasingly disadvantaged in a recruitment market increasingly accessible to multilingual continental Europeans.

Over recent years a vicious circle of inadequate supply has been generated by a shortage of language teachers. Also, many university departments that train language teachers are threatened with closure, as have those specialising in Languages. The mismatch between demand and education supply is extremely wide in the tourism and hospitality sectors as languages are largely absent from tourism and hospitality education and training courses.

The Nuffield Languages Inquiry (2000) expects that the need for properly qualified public service interpreters is likely to grow in the foreseeable future.

Source: Connell 2002, Reed Multilingual Solutions 2001 and Nuffield Languages Inquiry 2000

The five business languages most in demand in the UK are French, German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch.

There is increasing demand for Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin/Cantonese, Portuguese and Russian.

Within the public service sector in the UK a different range of languages is needed to offer a better services to the local communities such as the British sign language, Gujarati, Hindi, Panjabi, Swahili, Urdu and Welsh.

Source: Languages Work website 2004 and Regional Language Skills Capacity Audits (2001-2003)