State of Brazil IT: English for tech professionals

Posted by By IT Decisions at 1 November, at 19 : 42 PM Print

With The Economist in Brazil this week focused on where Brazil is heading in the next decade, IT Decisions is commenting on a series of points raised during discussions in our LinkedIn forum. This chapter of our report State of Brazil IT discusses the language skills – English in particular – of Brazilian technology professionals.

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English is not the national language of Brazil, Portuguese is. So why would English language knowledge be an important skill for IT professionals in Brazil?

Through centuries of global economic dominance by the UK and then the USA, English has become the dominant global language for trade. It is an essential tool for anyone working in a global company, or within a multinational team spread across various locations. In many countries that use multiple languages – such as India – English has become the lingua franca, allowing people from different regions of the same country to communicate.

But English is useful at a more fundamental level for IT professionals. Most programming languages, operating systems, and IT equipment have all originated from English-speaking engineers – usually American. This means that a knowledge of technical English is needed just to use computer systems, even if the professional cannot fluently debate the role of the Fool in King Lear.

This also leads to all kinds of translation problems as language coach and translator Kleber Pedroso described to IT Decisions recently. Cloud computing is really just cloud computing in any language. Try talking about computação em nuvem in Brazil and even the local Brazilian IT professionals will think you are a bit odd.

There are some in the IT industry in Brazil who fear that a lack of English holds them back, it’s impossible to progress to a management or executive grade without a good knowledge of English. And there is some truth in this: IT Decisions has yet to meet a Brazilian executive at CIO level who could not at least use English as a working language, even if they often prefer a detailed interview to be conducted in Portuguese.

One of the issues in Brazil has been a focus on technical English for IT professionals. There has been a tendency to gear training around the need to code software and understand technical books and blogs to a level that allows the IT professional to function with English, but not really communicate as part of a team. As anyone can tell you, working in IT is about a lot more than just coding – communication at all levels is required for a project to work.

The multi-million dollar Englisoft program run by Brasscom was launched in 2006 and aimed at boosting the number of English-speaking IT professionals. It was quietly dropped earlier this year when it became obvious that the stated aim would never be achievable with the available resource.

The latest research report by Brasscom trumpeting the IT industry in Brazil doesn’t mention that this program was shut down, it just talks about a government-sponsored English program aimed at providing free English courses for 80,000 people before the FIFA World Cup in 2014. However, it is not likely that any of these free courses will help IT professionals as they are designed to improve the quality of English in the tourism and hospitality industries – so tourists arriving for major sporting events find it easier to vacation in Brazil.

There are many in the IT industry who argue that business English is just not good enough for a team member to integrate into a global team. However, the reality is that the vast majority of work within the Brazilian IT sector is still Brazil focused – IT exports remain low because of the sheer scale of economic growth at home.

Although it’s a shame to see good intentions such as Englisoft fall by the wayside, Brasscom can hardly be faulted for reviewing their strategy. The program was underfunded and probably not as useful as targeting existing English qualifications such as TOEFL anyway.

All this leaves the industry in something of a dilemma. Everyone from the CIOs to the government acknowledges that for the Brazilian IT industry to be an integral part of the global IT community, English language skills must improve – but at the moment there seems to be no coordinated national plan for how to make this happen.

Perhaps it is just down to the individual IT industry professionals to show that if they want to stand out and get promoted quickly, they are going to have to learn exactly what those John Lennon or Morrissey lyrics really mean. It might just be the most practical approach – invest in language school shares now.

Look out for the full State of Brazil IT report, to be published on this website later this week.

Photo by Pargon licensed under Creative Commons

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