Talking about global business, I came across a tender recently for the update of an interactive map, with the successful company contracted to add case studies to a Flash map. This is the kind of thing we do on a regular basis for a wide range of clients. Indeed, anyone who knows Flash could have done this.
The problem? The documentation was only available in French. Responses were probably required in French as well. Yet, we’re supposed to be part of a European business community where, in theory, you should have just as good a chance to win a contract in Paris as in Portsmouth. In theory.
There’s two problems here – the first is that nations tend to do business with companies within their own nations. I’ve got no issue with this, as this is the public sector looking out for their own national economies by supporting their own businesses which is what our Government should do more of in my opinion. What I do have an issue with is why waste everyone else’s time by even publishing the tender to a European audience in the first place, when everyone knows this particular contract is likely to be awarded to a French company.
The second issue I have with this is that when the UK publish tenders in English, most Europeans can read and write extremely good English so they could feasibly bid on them and have a competitive chance of winning them. Indeed the UK has a track record of awarding contracts to the provider who demonstrates best value regardless of nationality, unlike most other EU nations.
While I must admit I didn’t go on to study any languages beyond my school days, aside from HTML which doesn’t really count in this argument, I don’t believe anyone in my office did either as we tended to focus our graduate studies on things like graphic design or programming or marketing – things that we are very good at and that we do for a living. At best, our foreign language skills are tested briefly on holidays once or twice a year – hardly up to business negotiation standards!
There is a commission set up in Brussells to oversee European tenders, and all public sector tenders over a certain value have to be published Europe wide via the OJEU system, yet by agreeing to abide by this and not having an education policy to match our EU competitors we seem to be somewhat disadvantaged as a nation.
Our national foreign language literacy is way down on most other European countries. Indeed, I tried to find the official statistics online, but they aren’t exactly well published, and if they are the figures are a little blurry to say the least. I did find this graph though from Eurostat, which is the Statistical Office of the European Communities based in Luxembourg.
Non-Native Languages Studied Throughout Europe
If you click on it you can see a larger version, and you can work out what all the country abbreviations are for yourself. Regardless of whether you get them all, we’re the one at the far end.
My schoolboy French isn’t going to win us this contract, even though we may well be the perfect agency for the job. From the looks of this graph, most other creative agencies in the UK are going to be in the same boat, which is going to make it difficult for the UK to really capitalise on any global knowledge economy in the short to medium term until we’re churning out multi-lingual graduates at the same rate as the rest of Europe so that we can effectively compete with the rest of Europe around the business table.
“C’est la vie” as they say in Brussells.
