Assisting Job Seekers with Industry Specific Bilingual Vocabularies

I have been interpreting for many Chinese job seekers in their employment consultant interviews over the last 13 years. As a fly on the wall, I have witnessed the frustration of many newly arrived or established migrants struggling to find work in the industries they worked in their own countries, due to language barriers.  

For many of them, it will be too late to learn a different trade to the same level of proficiency as their previous one. It saddens me to see so many skills and experiences gained over years of practice in their own countries going down the drain, not to mention the financial stresses and mental health consequences unemployment will have on these workers and their families. 

Current English language programs available target at two groups of people: academic English for students run by educational institutions, and general English proficiency for new migrants provided by government approved providers such as AMES. There is a genuine gap when it comes to trade and language specific English training. 

A Chinese doctor friend has just been through a preparatory course run by Melbourne University and passed her qualification exams. For industries that are faced with a genuine skill shortage, such as the construction industry, I think it will be worthwhile to have a partnership between translation companies like us, employment services and industries, in designing language and industry-specific English programs. It will be cheaper to provide such workers in trade related language training than training an unskilled worker from scratch. 

Likewise, we can also develop Mandarin and Cantonese training programs and vocabularies for business managers and foremen who are managing a large number of Chinese workers. Many of our translators have language teaching qualifications and experiences for teaching both children and adults. [More about Us]

The vocabularies need to be trade specific, relevant and up-to-date, and the translation needs to be accurate. The beauty is that once they are developed, there is very little cost. The workers may just need one session from the coach at the beginning to learn how to use the vocabulary table and probably some learning strategies, and intermittent sessions to monitor progress and pronunciations. Self-directed learning is possible as these workers are presumed to have a general level of language proficiency in terms of sentence structures etc from their earlier English training, from institutions such as AMES. 

[Tips on learning a Second Languages: Auditory Vs Visual Learner]