6 November 2025. From classroom to career: How languages helped shape my life path
From classroom to career: How languages helped shape my life path
Languages graduate and public relations professional Oliver Buckley recounts the journey from school language lessons to running international multi-language business projects.
By Oliver Buckley, Director at Kekst CNC.
(All views expressed here are my own)
I’ve always loved words. I remember spending hours as a child engrossed in crosswords and word searches, then as I got older it would be playing games of Scrabble or watching Countdown on TV.
As I went through school this grew into a love of words and language, inspiring me to study German and Russian which were offered at my school. I liked them so much that I continued to degree level and have learned more languages since including Spanish.
Now, almost 20 years into my career in corporate communications & public relations, I’m indebted to what I learned back then and over the years since – having equipped me with the ability to read about business deals in German, understand the role of steel production in Russian, or monitor the growth of the Mexican economy in Spanish.
That’s why the decline of language study in the UK makes me feel really sad.
I get it: studying languages isn’t as flashy or evidently career-linked as, say, STEM subjects.
And learning a language is really hard. It demands a lot of work and dedication to be able to say even quite basic sentences.
Moreover, you can expect a healthy dose of embarrassment by saying something stupid when you don’t know all the words. It takes great resilience to try again knowing full well that you’ll likely go through this process again and again – this is surely a big blocker for learners to move forward.
Nowadays, I could imagine teachers facing apathetic students saying “Why bother? I can just use Google Translate”.
But this gets to the essence of language learning. Think about all that you gain.
It teaches you how to:
- think on your feet.
- think before you speak.
- think creatively.
- convey a point of view in different ways.
- engage with people from different backgrounds and cultures.
Languages have served me tremendously in my life and career.
When I was looking for jobs after graduating, I knew that speaking another language was my point of differentiation from the thousands of other graduates competing for the same jobs.
Am I the world’s best German speaker? Absolutely not. But good enough? Yes. And my first job was one where being an English native, German speaker was the exact job description being sought and where the pool of talent was very small.
Working in communications and PR, where crafting messages and narratives is fundamental, I use words and word combinations to help explain why businesses take certain decisions and how this impacts their audiences – such as customers, employees or investors.
So the very skills I learned when I was younger are what I draw on today, every day.
And languages have opened doors for me: for example multiple stints working in Germany with my first employer precisely because there was a need for an English native, German speaker.
But you know what truly captivates me about languages? It’s the freedom they offer to fully immerse in different cultures.
It means watching Messi in an Argentina football game in Spanish on TV with local commentary – and feeling the emotion from the commentator’s “goooollllllllllllllllll”.
It means a solo cycle trip across Colombia going through small mountain villages and having fun conversations with locals who haven’t met a foreigner before.
It means listening to the cheesy hits of the Oktoberfest in Germany and being able to sing along with friends old and new.
I studied some of the great authors like Goethe, Kafka, Pushkin and Solzhenitsyn.
And whilst I learned a lot from them, I can’t say that literature is what inspired me.
But:
Being able to watch TV with locals in other countries.
Going off the beaten track on holiday where no tourists ever go.
Talking to international colleagues or clients in their language.
These are where the magic lies. And this is how, if I had a magic wand, I would transform language learning.
With languages you need time and patience. There’s no shortcut to becoming proficient.
And the way to get people to persevere, in my opinion, and to develop the strong linguistic foundations on which everything else builds, is to make it relevant to their passions: football, dancing, travel, TV, music, film, hobbies, whatever…
And what comes from this, be it a decent level you can use on holiday or an advanced level to use in a job, is a byproduct of those first few years of getting young people to stick with it.
This is the way to inspire people and for languages to enrich people’s careers and lives.