Speak Spanish? First Language English? Want a Job?

The world around us is constantly changing. To remain employable we need to constantly update our skills, adding new skills that are in demand today. One of the skills currently in demand is the ability to communicate well with the largest minority in the U.S.A.

Out of more than 42 million people of Hispanic origin in the U.S. there are about 17 million who either don''t speak English or don''t speak it very well. These people are working, making money and buying the things they want and need. There is a huge market here, and all kinds of companies are eager to get their share of the Hispanic market''s dollars! To deal with and sell to this large market segment, business companies need employees who can communicate in Spanish. So they are looking high and low for good bilingual (English-Spanish) people to hire.

Searching through job openings at careerbuilder.com, the largest U.S. employment network, on April 16, 2007, for the qualification "bilingual" in the job title, turned up 12,070 open positions that employers are looking to fill. There were 160 pages of results, listing jobs in 33 States.

What do you need to qualify for one of those jobs? You need to be able to converse with a non-English speaker in Spanish. Many of the job offers specify that part of the job interview will be conducted in Spanish.

They aren''t asking for degrees, credentials, tests to see if you know how to conjugate verbs and diagram sentences. They just want to know if you can communicate, understand and make yourself understood in Spanish. Like with swimming, shooting hoops, singing or playing a musical instrument, it''s a demonstrable skill. Demonstrate it and you get hired.

So where can you get a crash-course in conversational Spanish? There are a number of good learning programs that can be bought and downloaded in minutes. Since they are on digital media on your computer, you can copy lessons to your iPod or CD player, take it around with you and study anywhere, in your spare time.

With a good learning program you can become conversational in Spanish in 30-90 days. Some say 2 weeks, but that will get you to basic conversation only, with a vocabulary of maybe 1,500 to 3,000 words. To be truly conversational you would need 4,000 to 8,000 words.

That is not too hard to achieve since Spanish and English have so many words in common or closely related. For example "actor", "Doctor" and many others are the same in Spanish and English, with minor pronunciation differences. Many words ending in "..ty" in English just change that to "..dad" in Spanish: municipality -- municipalidad, tranquility -- tranquilidad. This makes Spanish easy to learn and speeds the acquisition of vocabulary.

In summary then, learning conversational Spanish can increase your value in the job market. Spanish-speaking ability can qualify you for new positions, expand your career possibilities and increase your income. This in addition to a host of other advantages.

Spanish is easy to learn and does not take long to know enough to be able to converse easily. In view of all that, you might want to pick up a learning course and give it a whirl. It could be a personally profitable move!

To learn how to get the best Spanish-learning course available visit: Learn Spanish To learn more about learning Spanish, fast and easy, visit: Rocket Spanish

Jorge Chavez has been an internet entrepreneur and marketer since 2002. He began to learn Spanish after he was 30, now is bilingual English-Spanish. He has monolingual friends, relatives and clients who only speak Spanish and others who only speak English. Read his articles at http://rocket-spanish.ya23.com