Euroasia: Language, Culture and Travel

When I started working as a graduate in 1999, the unemployment rate was 7.5%. The unemployment rate now is about 4.2%. It just seems to me like everyone is so much more despondent this time around.  Is this because we’ve had so many years of low unemployment and economic growth that we’ve forgotten what a recession looks like? OK so the New Zealand Institute is projecting a rise in unemployment to 11%.  At this rate, it seems it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Everyone knows we’re going through a serious recession, but hey, we can’t change that. All we can do is to choose our response. The last thing that we should do is to keep complaining about how bad the recession is to our colleagues, customers and suppliers.  That’s not the best way to build confidence.

So, will the Job Summit on Friday make a difference? I don’t know. Ultimately, it’s up to individuals to make a difference. People with the right attitude committed to delivering superior value.

Times are tough. People are worried that they might lose their jobs as the unemployment rate starts creeping up. Job summit or no job summit. As always, during difficult times, the ones worst hit are the ones who are lacking in qualifications and experience.

It’s time to upskill. It seems university enrolments are up around the country, according to various local news articles.  Recent graduates who can’t find work are going back to university. But so are many students looking at gaining more qualifications in order to keep pace with developments.

During such perilous times, it’s important to understand what skills are in demand and how to stand out from the crowd. In New Zealand, where almost all native English speakers can only speak one language, knowing some basic foreign language can indeed be an advantage. Most of all you demonstrate to prospective employers that you have the ability to persevere with something as well as the ability to work across cultures. As New Zealand becomes more and more multicultural, the ability to communicate across cultures will be as essential as knowing how to use a computer.

New Zealand is an exporting nation. We would be poorer than Samoa or Tonga if we didn’t trade with our friends, and foreign tourists stop arriving. There are in fact more Chinese and Spanish speakers than there are English speakers.  Naturally, these are key languages to learn if one wants to learn how to communicate with our future customers.

But learning any language is useful. New Zealanders have traditionally learnt French, German and Japanese at school. Knowing any one of these languages would be useful. I have written at length about why one should learn each one of these languages, so feel free to check out my blog entries on why learn language