Demand for Mandarin skills grows in LA

LOS ANGELES — “My career has been heavily influenced by my Chinese language studies,” Cassandra Olson said.

“During the application process to my current company, I had a competitive advantage because I spoke Chinese fluently.”

Olson, from the US state of Texas, started learning Chinese aged 18 at Bard College in New York City. And later, Olson studied at the Peking University and the Harbin Institute of Technology.

Now, working in Los Angeles as the manager of business development for JL Real Estate Development, Olson uses a lot of Chinese at work.

“I use Chinese to respond to an average of around 60 WeChat messages every day,” said Olson.

And in addition to phone calls, emails, and meetings in Chinese, she also delivers speeches to Chinese-speaking audiences.

“Due to my language skills, I am able to be a bridge and open up a market that would be inaccessible to many Americans.”

Now, an increasing number of companies in Los Angeles are recruiting bilingual Chinese speakers.

A search on LinkedIn shows nearly 500,000 job openings requiring Chinese language skills in the United States.

And these openings are in sectors like technology, education, entertainment, hospitality, health, finance, banking, real estate and marketing.

Demand for Chinese language skills is being fueled by more Chinese-speaking customers in the US, according to the American Community Survey. And it shows that more than 1.6 million of the almost 3 million Chinesespeaking immigrants in the country have limited English proficiency.

Also, in addition to immigrants, local businesses are factoring in Chinese-speaking travelers.

In 2016, almost 3 million Chinese tourists visited the US and more than one in three picked Los Angeles as their first stop of the trip.

Research by the US Department of Commerce shows that Chinese tourists spent $33 billion in the country that year, and experts expect these figures to grow.

Seeking to tap into this new opportunity to help Chinese outbound travelers is Betty Ban, co-founder of voyadi.com, a travel tech company.

She said: “In the Chinese outbound tourism industry, culture and language gaps prevent Chinese tourists from having an optimal travel experience abroad. So, we want more Chinese-speaking candidates to work in marketing and in customer-facing roles.”

Also focusing on the Chinese language skills is Xiaowei Ding, a UCLA assistant professor of computer science and co-founder and CEO of Voxelcloud, a Los Angeles-based startup that provides automated medical diagnosis through artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies.

Speaking about how Chinese language skills help, he said: “With the growth of venture capital and the financial markets in China, companies whose staff can communicate in Chinese stand out when it comes to raising funds, marketing and sales.”

And, Jeff Allred, the CEO of the San Gabriel Valley Economic Partnership, said: It (the need for Chinese language skills) is a demand that will continue to grow.”

Allred’s organization is a regional, nonprofit corporation that supports businesses, nonprofits and local governments in the San Gabriel Valley, the eastern section of LA county famous for Asian cuisine, where over half of the US’ Chinese population lives, according to research by Asian-Americans Advancing Justice.

But beyond Chinese language skills, Allred said that reaching Chinese customers is not just about speaking the language, adding that his outfit is also helping organizations in the San Gabriel Valley to engage with customers on WeChat.

Reflecting on her experiences while learning Chinese, Olson said: “The truly aweinspiring thing is realizing that knowing Chinese opens up communication with over 1.3 billion people that I would not have been able to communicate with earlier. That is truly amazing.”