first published: 21.08.2021
Luxembourg has a unique demography with nealy half (47%) of the residents are non-citizens and again nearly half (46%) of the payroll employment in Luxembourg are cross-border commuters, from Germany, France and Belgium. Together, they bring a high number of foreign speaking workers and residents together, and create a unique requirement for employees to be able to interact with people and customers in several different languages on a daily basis. Consequently, the most jobs in Luxembourg require expertise, at least verbal communication, in several languages.
The four main languages (spoken and written) in Luxembourg are Luxembourgish, French, German and English, and from a little over 42,000 jobs offered through the national employment agency Agence pour le développement de l’emploi (ADEM) is last 18 months (01.01.2020 – 30.06.2021), the language requirements (obligation as well as expected) show that knowing only one language could only avail less than one-fifth of all jobs (18% with French only). Even with the knowledge of three of the four main languages, only 2 out of every 3 jobs could be applied and employers asked for knowledge of all four languages in 15% of the all job offers in the above time period.
Here we look at the primary language that you know (click on one of the four button below) and then it shows how many jobs one could apply with addition of other languages. With the knowledge of all four languages, one can apply up to 99% of all the jobs, with French being the most dominating language skill required.
Note: Limitations of the data
1) The percentages are ONLY matched to the language skills and it does not reflect how many jobs one can actually apply. The percentages would be very small depending on the other job requirements other than languages.
2) Of the 42,000 job overs available over the 18 month period, many jobs are re-posted and therefore may not be unique job offers (duplicate data). Also, it is possible that there were several jobs from the same employer with similar titles and requirements, and therefore may not be unique jobs.
3) In the above chart, please note that ‘jobs with multiple languages’ are a combination of all, meaning, for example a on the chart with LU+FR+DE would mean = [ (job offers requiring at least LU+FR+DE) + (job offers requiring at least LU+FR) + (job offers requiring at least LU+DE) + (job offers requiring at least FR+DE) + (job offers requiring at least FR) + (job offers requiring at least LU) + (job offers requiring at least DE) ]. The ‘at least’ means that additional languages requested is possible other than the four.
4) 0.7% of jobs did not specified any language requirements.
