SPOKEN LANGUAGE SKILLS


Due to many travels abroad and an interest in languages, I speak several languages fairly well.


I have held a training in Spanish once, because after some weeks my Spanish was better than the customer's English.
More recent I have created manuals in German and English and provided operator trainings in these languages.


I have a nice recent example of when technical knowledge and language skills work well together to get the job done.
At a customer site, there were two external commissioning engineers for different machines. One was French, the other German.

We needed to set up connections and data exchange between PCS 7 (AS-410) and the local PLC's of the two machines.
I communicated with both in their own language to coordinate the project.
Because they lacked the knowledge to set up the needed type of connection, I did that for them on their engineering laptops; one being in German in Step 7 (CPU-315),  the other being in French in TIA Portal (S7-1500).

Dutch (native)

100%

English

80%

German

80%

French

60%

Spanish (used to be at about 30% once but haven't practiced for a while)

10%