A NEW SURVEY has shown that English remains the top language in the workplace.
According to a study carried out by secretarial school Sara Beattie College and analysed as part of our final year project, written English is still more commonly used than Chinese, despite the availability of Chinese word-processing software.
The people surveyed were confident that their English standard met the needs of their jobs. However, managers expressed less confidence in the English abilities of their workers.
The aim of the study - 'The Role of English in Financial and Customer Services Sectors' - was to assess the importance of English in the workplace. Questionnaires were distributed to 203 employees in different job categories including hotel, banking, customer services, law, accounting, IT, airlines, public relations and insurance.
More than half of the respondents indicated they used written English every day to communicate with clients. One to two per cent of respondents said they rarely used English.
The results show that spoken English is essential in jobs involving customer services while written English is particularly important in professional jobs.
