Generation Global

1. Celebrate the languages spoken in your school/college/university community. Film staff, parents and students speaking their home languages, and show them on your website and around the building; this is both empowering and inspiring for those involved.
2. Celebrate national days of countries which are represented in your community, with taster language sessions, food, music or events.
3. Organise speakers and careers events which show the value of languages in the workplace. 
4. Invite language ambassadors from modern languages departments in Scottish universities to speak to/mentor pupils. The MFL Student Mentoring Project in Wales may give some ideas of how to do this.
5. Encourage projects which foster collaboration with school/college/university communities in other countries, using different languages. SCILT’s Language Linking Global Thinking is one way to do this.
6. Engage with events and resources organised by SCILT; sign up to our weekly bulletin to be the first to hear about these!
7. Ensure that a range of languages, at interest and certification level, is available to students.
8. Encourage global citizenship, tolerance and cultural understanding.
9. For schools, encourage a global focus in teaching and learning; how is each subject area taught and regarded around the world? What can we learn from that? Try some CLIL/IDL lessons to strengthen links between languages and other subject areas.
10. For universities, establish an Institution-Wide Language Programme. The University of Edinburgh Open Languages courses is a fine example.

A list of key resources and websites, published by the Association for Language Learning, to show the wide range of language-related career options.

Looking for ways to sustain the profile of languages? This blog post, published by the Association of Language Learning, shares tips to make languages more prominent in school life.

LLAS set out 700 reasons for learning languages, and how this equip students with the knowledge and skills to take advantage of twenty-first century opportunities.

Paul James Cardwell, a Professor in Law at the University of Strathclyde, examines how study abroad enhances academic achievement and equips graduates with skills which are highly valued by employers in this article Does studying abroad help academic achievement? (European Journal of Higher Education, January 2019).

Born Global is a free-to-use resource for the languages community, with compelling data on the relationships between language learning and employability.

Bernadette Holmes’ article, Global Britain Requires More and Better Language Skills (2017), places languages firmly in the matrix of wider employability skills for the twenty-first century.

Raquel Fernández Sánchez, of Aston University, explores the vital importance of languages to business and careers in Why Languages Make Business Sense.

From the European Commission website, this useful list of example projects will equip teachers with a knowledge of the type of language skills in demand on the labour market, and help them to focus on appropriate outcomes. The EU-commissioned OMC report 'Languages for Jobs' highlights the main challenges associated with the provision of language skills for the labour market, recommending modernisation of education systems to focus on employment-related aspects of language learning.

From the Career Zone website of the University of Exeter, this resource includes a very useful section on where to find vacancies for jobs that require languages.