New grads who speak English and French have a huge range of opportunities open to them.

Being bilingual gives you more opportunities to enter the employment market, according to Marijke Kanters, Managing Director of bilingual placement agency Nevian Consulting & Placement Services. “You are able to get into certain companies that as a unilingual person you are not able to get into.”

Indeed, the shortage is so extreme that companies are hiring bilingual people without experience. Salaries are often higher too. The salary premium is either stated in the job advertisement or just factored in.

From Technology to Trucking
Patrick Harquail, a business administration and marketing graduate from Durham College, Oshawa, Ontario, says he was looking for something extra that would give him a leg up in the employment market. Harquail’s first job out of college was with a company that repaired laptops. He worked on the phone taking customer service calls in English and French. Although he went to a French immersion school up to grade eight, his French was a little rusty. “I got a lot better at that point and gained a lot of confidence,” he says.

From there, he moved to Rogers where he specialized in telephone sales for Quebec, and after that he  worked for a Quebecois trucking company in the organization’s only terminal outside the French-speaking province. “I spent most of the day speaking with French people,” he says. Now, after being recruited through Nevian, he’s working in a Shoppers Drug Mart’s call centre, fielding English and French calls, where five out of the nine staff are bilingual.

How Fluent Do You Need to Be?
Of course, a certain degree of fluency in both languages is essential before an employer will consider you fully bilingual. Kanters says you don’t have to be perfect but you do need to be able to hold a business conversation without reverting to your first language. And, of course, your first language has to be perfect before you will even be considered for a bilingual position. The level of writing skills required varies depending on the position. For many jobs, written skills are not very important. But for those that do require excellent written French (or English), your language ability must be 100%.

Life in a Bilingual Workplace
Bilingual workers agree that a bilingual environment is perhaps the best way to polish second-language skills. Sébastien Girard is a native Quebecois who works with bilingual placement agency Randstad. He started as a consultant for the company in Ville St Laurent in January 2001, was promoted to branch manger 16 months later and became market manager – overseeing several branches – at the start of 2004.

“The fact that I was not perfectly bilingual in 2002 was not an obstacle to becoming a branch manger,” he  says. “Because I worked in a bilingual environment, my English got better and better, which helped me to reach the market manager position.”

A bilingual environment provides constant practice – essential for mastering any skill. And with bilingual colleagues around you, you can get constant feedback and help with correcting your written language in emails and letters. Indeed, smart bilingual workers build a strong team with their colleagues. They realize that in some cases, a native French speaker – or native English speaker - might be better at handling some situations; some linguistic subtleties are much better picked up by someone who speaks the language as their native tongue.

According to Kanters, being bilingual can help with job satisfaction. “People come to you with everything,  even if it’s outside your field,” she says. “You are needed for a lot of different things, which makes it more
satisfying.” jp