Category: Professional Development

To make progress on any task, we all know that we should break it down to its constituent pieces, and that slow and steady is always the way to go for any big, looming project, but as September draws near and with Fall routines picking up again, it can start to feel impossible to make the time for making progress on big career development goals like career education & exploration, or setting up a side project, or growing your business. This is the time of year where I can start to feel the walls closing in a little bit, and I know this is largely owing to some of the bad habits I cultivated in graduate school around binge writing, such that I feel like the only way I can make progress on anything is to have big open chunks of time on my calendar – whole days, weekends, or even weeks seem like the only way to go. When I can’t see these on the horizon, I start to get stressed!

So, my new approach to making the time involves pushing in little bits of work (20 minute increments to be exact), working these in as little holes around everything else that needs to get done during the days, weeks, months as they unfold.  I call this practice “swiss-cheesing it.”

The technique is the Pomodoro, downloadable as an app to your phone, a system of bells and ticks that helps you focus for 20 minutes intervals, but as for what to be working on during any given Pomodoro – this is a practice that I also cultivated as part of my dissertation process – a blended combination of reading, writing, and research (RWR).

Reading, Writing, and Research (RWR)
In professional practice, what this looks like is having made time to have done some writing before you have a networking conversation so that you are more easily able to explain to the person with whom you are talking what it is that you actually do (would like to do, are looking for more opportunities to do).  However, having this networking conversation in the first place requires having done enough research to have found the networking event, or scheduled the informational interview, or to even recognize the opportunity when you are given it to talk about the professional things that you are looking for opportunities to talk about.  Of course, knowing what it is that even you want to talk about in the first place also requires some research (reading and writing) and there will always be a call for more RWR in the follow-up, when the person you have proposed an idea to asks for more information, etc.

We can take my current Career Linguist business activities as an example. As I gear up for the upcoming academic year, you can currently find me sending out batches of emails to all the career centers who have linguistics programs across the country (and Canada, and the UK) about a professional development workshop for linguistics students that I am looking to offer this year.  Getting to this point of being able to send these out has recently required RWR in the form of identifying these schools, crafting my pitch, and learning enough about what is currently being offered to know how to craft the pitch. But this has also required a couple years’ worth of RWR to even identify this opportunity, to realize that no one was adopting a linguistic approach to thinking about career, and then deciding on the form in which I wanted to contribute to this gap in literature and practice (a book, a workshop), and then developing all of the pieces of communication that comprise and surround these (my bio, my blog, etc). And there will hopefully be RWR cycles in my immediate future as these folks write back requesting more info in the form of developing more detailed workshop descriptions, blurbs, interviews to publicize it, etc.

So, if you are just starting this practice – try for 3 Pomodoros this week: 1 each for some RWR that helps you make progress on some aspect of professional development that you deem important. You will get better with practice at choosing tasks that can be completed in about 20 minutes, but for now, take note of how these three pieces (RWR) interrelatate and mutually reinforce one another. And if you are really stuck for how to begin, use them by spending an hour this week on LinkedIn.

And let us know how it goes!
“Here’s to what’s next!!”

This post is written by guest blogger Patrick Goodridge a linguist, language teacher, and writer based in Philadelphia, PA. Read more about Patrick below or on the Career Linguist guest bloggers page where you can also learn about being a guest blogger for Career Linguist yourself!!

According to the US government, some languages are more important than others! These languages tend to be the hardest to learn, according to time-to-mastery rankings by the Foreign Service Institute, whose rankings tend to list the languages most different from English in morphology and phonology as taking the longest to learn. As a result of their difficulty, very few people speak these languages despite the country’s need for them. Hence, they are known as the “critical languages”, which makes it critical for linguists to learn them.

The concept of critical languages was originally introduced by the US State Department, the organization that still devotes the most scholarships, fellowships, and other funding to their learning by US citizens. These are the languages defined as most essential to meeting the current diplomatic, defense, and economic needs of the country. The operative word here is current; languages like German or Italian that would’ve been at the top of that list in 1942, or Vietnamese in the late 1960s, are now nowhere to be found. Likewise, languages thought to be crucial to US interests today (Arabic, Farsi, and Dari/Pashto) may one day be replaced by, say, the Slavic languages, reflecting the unrest in Ukraine and recent US-Russian political entanglements. Developments in the South China Sea would suggest that Chinese could also emerge as very crucial in the next century, and instability on the Korean peninsula could bring the North Korean dialect to the forefront of defense language strategy (The CIA’s creation of a Korea Mission Center to deal with North Korea supports this possibility). In fact, language needs are sometimes so variable that a single event or series of political developments can transform the language education landscape. For example, following the September 11th attacks, American student enrollment in Arabic language courses grew by 126.5% from 2002 to 2006 and then again by another 46.3% between 2006 and 2009. This variability suggests the importance of considering the global political context when deciding which critical language to pursue. Still, one should balance the necessity of learning a particular language’s necessity with your interest in doing so, since the more the language and the culture around it interest you, the more you’ll be motivated to learn.

The idea of critical languages can be interpreted broadly. As a result, the number of languages deemed critical varies widely; the National Security Education Program (NSEP) includes nearly FIFTY languages on its list, from Albanian, to Malay, to Yoruba, and all the languages in between of countries with which the United States has complex relations. Not all lists are as robust, however; the State Department’s own Critical Language Scholarship is much more conservative: Azerbaijani, Bangla, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Punjabi, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu, Arabic Persian, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. It’s useful to further narrow this list by focusing on the languages that occur consistently across all sources: Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Korean (especially North Korean dialect), Dari, and Pashto.

A knowledge of a critical language can carry significant weight, opening doors to career advancement as well as personal growth. Along with considering which languages are most critical to the government or to corporations, however, also consider which language or languages are most critical to you yourself. I’ve personally found Russian to be the most appealing language to me, from the language’s beautiful literature to Russia’s tumultuous political past and how its values differ from my own culture’s. I’m fortunate enough to have the support of a number of government funding opportunities in my Russian studies, including the State Department’s Title VIII Fellowship for the Post-Soviet states and the Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship. I highly recommend pursuing particular education programs that offer such grants. I could not be happier with the response I’ve received from employers and colleagues because of my knowledge of Russian and other critical languages, like Turkish. Ultimately, choose the language that will not just be most critical to your country, but be most critical to your career, your personal life, and your future.

Applications for the 2017-2018 National Security Language Initiative for Youth are currently closed, but stay tuned in the Fall for the release of the 2018-2019 application. Interested students should also explore the Boren Award (which has a late January deadline), various Title VIII programs with Fall deadlines, and should see if FLAS funding is available from their institution for support of study abroad programs.