Just a cursory glance at the jobs pages is enough to confirm the increasing importance placed on language skills in today's employment market. And when it comes to the level of those the skills required, the bar seems to be rising.
'Nowadays, higher education is crucial to upgrading the economy,' says Professor Thomas Lee Hun-tak, head of the division of linguistics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).
'People from various industries expect their employees to have master's degrees. For instance, secondary schools and high schools in mainland China and in Hong Kong now expect teachers to possess a master's degree,' he adds.
'It is not adequate just to have a bachelor's from a first-tier university. This has increased the pressure for teachers to receive higher education so they can stay on in their jobs,' he says.
Lee believes that the postgraduate programmes run by his department at CUHK can help open the door to a very broad range of careers.
'With solid training in linguistics and a wide exposure to diverse disciplines, our graduates are in a strong position to pursue careers [in various fields],' Lee says, citing language education, business and public administration, interpretation and translation, journalism, other media and communication-related services, computer language processing and language engineering research, speech therapy, as well as brain and cognitive sciences research.