How important is English for companies today and in the future? A questionnaire for Swiss companies (PDF)

Technischer Bericht aus dem Jahr 2014 im Fachbereich BWL - Unternehmensforschung, Operations Research, Note: 5.0, ZHAW - Zürcher Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften (Zentrum für Aviatik), Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: In these days, English is taught pretty early, in the third grade to be exact. However, this refers only to the north-eastern part of Switzerland. In the French part of Switzerland, as well as in the area around Bern, English is taught at the latest from the fifth grade. In Ticino the world-language starts in the eighth grade.

Due to globalisation, the English language is getting more and more important. A vast number of companies already call for employees who have at least basic knowledge in the English language. Some branches of the industry require higher skills than others, but maybe in the future, everybody has to master English to be able to do his / her job. Nevertheless, many elderly employees haven't had such a good English education as it is taught in school nowadays, except they took private English lessons. Considering only language skills, the younger generation has a huge advantage as they can show advanced English skills.

Our goal is to determine, whether Switzerland's industry thinks English should be a bigger deal in school, to be more precise, if the teaching of English should start even earlier than today. Also we want to know, if the companies are satisfied with the current English skills of their employees.

We send an online questionnaire to a variety of companies from different branches, asking how important the English language in their business is, how important it might become, if English should be taught in schools earlier and if they are satisfied with the English skills of their employees. After a given amount of time, we analyse the answers of the companies and arrange them in a diagram, so we can see how the importance of English changes.