What English gives you on the job market
The freshest large-scale data for Russia comes from a joint study by hh.ru and the online school Skyeng. Analysts looked at almost 2 million CVs and more than 10.2 million vacancies from 2023.
The number of vacancies requiring a foreign language fell by 7%, yet candidates who list the skill get invited to interviews more often: 11.2 invitations per CV on average, against 8.8 for candidates without a language. Candidates with English ask for salaries 27% higher on average than colleagues without it, whatever their level.
The gap is widest in management and IT. In senior management, candidates with English can expect salaries from 177,000 roubles, without it from 106,000. In IT, from 103,000 against 74,000. In percentage terms, English adds the most in security (108%), law (96%), finance (83%) and insurance (80%).
English also affects how fast you grow. Skyeng notes that people with good English are promoted more often, especially to middle and senior management. International data says the same. About half of employers offer candidates with good English a better starting package. Good English also speeds up the move between grades (50% of employers think so) and helps people get bigger raises (46%).
There is good news for anyone just planning to improve: the competition is low. According to Cambridge English and QS, Russia is among the countries with the largest gap between the English level employers need and the level employees actually have. The latest EF ranking shows the same picture: Russia is 49th with a score of 521.
At work, your English is judged by ear
Here is a detail that is easy to miss. The most common way employers check English when hiring is an interview in English. In other words, your level is judged by how you speak. Yet in more than half of the countries EF assessed, speaking turned out to be the weakest skill.
In an interview, the other person hears everything at once: vocabulary, grammar and the way you pronounce words. And research shows that pronunciation noticeably affects decisions.
In an experiment by Laura Huang and colleagues, candidates with a non-native accent were less often recommended for a middle-management position, even though they delivered the same prepared answers as native speakers. The effect was fully explained by how listeners rated their political skill — the ability to influence and persuade people. In the second part of the study, entrepreneurs with a non-native accent were significantly less likely to receive venture funding. The authors note that the effect can be worked on: speakers are able to soften it.
Psychologists Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar described a similar mechanism. Accented speech is harder to process, and that difficulty makes the speaker less credible: listeners rated the same statements as less true when they were said by someone with an accent. The researchers explain it this way: when a sentence is harder to understand, it seems less plausible. A more recent study adds that the more effort a listener has to spend understanding speech, the lower they rate the speaker’s warmth and competence, and the less they want to interact with them.
Calls and remote work
Most work communication now happens in Zoom, Teams and voice messages. There are no gestures, often no picture, and the connection is not always good.
A study of global virtual teams found that the speaker’s accent affects how feedback in voice messages is perceived, separately from language proficiency. The authors also cite data showing that non-native speakers of the corporate language experience anxiety that can make them withdraw from communication. Familiar to anyone who stays quiet on a call despite having something to say.
Noise works the same way. In an experiment with cafeteria background noise, the intelligibility of many accented sentences dropped sharply. For work calls from an open-plan office or a café, that matters.
The goal is speech people understand
You don’t need to sound like a native speaker for your career. Linguists Murray Munro and Tracey Derwing showed that a strong accent is linked to how easy speech is to understand, but does not by itself make it less intelligible. Speech can have a noticeable accent and still be perfectly clear.
The practical conclusion: work on what gets in the way of being understood. For example, the sounds that change the meaning of a word, stress and intonation.
How to learn English for work
1. Define your work scenarios. List the situations where you need English: interviews, weekly calls, client presentations, messages to colleagues. Learning the language for specific tasks is faster and more useful than working through a general course.
2. Build a work vocabulary. Collect words and phrases from documentation, colleagues’ emails, industry articles and podcasts. Check how they are pronounced using the transcription or audio in a dictionary, so you remember the correct version from the start.
3. Rehearse your key monologues. Your interview self-introduction, a project summary, a stand-up update come up again and again. Record them and listen back. You will notice the pauses and the words you are unsure of.
4. Train pronunciation regularly and with feedback. A meta-analysis of 86 studies showed that pronunciation instruction has a large effect overall, especially when it lasts longer and the learner gets feedback. Short daily practice works better than rare long sessions.
5. Confirm your level with a certificate. If an employer asks for a document, note that the Cambridge BEC business certificates are no longer issued. Linguaskill, B1 Preliminary, B2 First or C1 Advanced are recommended instead. Linguaskill Business tests English in a business context and suits hiring at companies where staff need business English. Exam conditions in Russia keep changing, so check the current information with the exam centre before you register.
How pronunciation helps your career
When you work on pronunciation, several things change at once.
People understand you the first time. The listener doesn’t have to ask again or guess words from context, so they stay focused on your ideas. In an interview it helps you come across as a confident professional; in negotiations it makes you more persuasive.
You sound polite. In English, politeness is carried largely by intonation. Coaches who work with Russian-speaking learners note that Russian statement intonation is flatter and more direct than English speakers are used to, and a flat delivery comes across as distant or unfriendly. Once your intonation is in place, your polite phrases actually sound polite.
You stop being afraid to speak. When you are sure how a word is pronounced, you use it instead of swapping it for a simpler one. It becomes easier to join the discussion on a call or ask a speaker a question at a conference.
You understand others better. Working on pronunciation trains your ear: once you can tell similar sounds apart yourself, you start hearing the difference in your colleagues’ speech too.
How to train pronunciation with BClear Lab
BClear Lab is an AI coach for English pronunciation. The app runs in the browser on a laptop or a phone. It follows the movement of your lips and jaw through the camera and analyses the sound through the microphone. Then it explains exactly what to change in your articulation to get the sound right.
A session takes 15–20 minutes a day, and you can do it on your own, with no stress and nobody watching. The camera video is not recorded: recognition runs right on your device. It is built on Modern RP British pronunciation, and you can start from B1.
The app is getting ready to launch. Join the waitlist to be among the first to train your pronunciation for work.
Sources
- hh.ru and Skyeng, 2023 data (Inc.): incrussia.ru
- Cambridge English and QS, English at Work: cambridgeenglish.org
- EF English Proficiency Index 2025: ef.edu
- Huang, Frideger, Pearce, 2013: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010: sciencedirect.com
- Rovetti et al., 2023: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Szymanski & Brighi, 2025: sciencedirect.com
- Munro, 1998: cambridge.org
- Munro & Derwing, 1995: eric.ed.gov
- Lee, Jang, Plonsky, 2015: eric.ed.gov
- BEC replacement: exams-owl.com
- Linguaskill Business: exams-madrid.com
- Intonation of Russian speakers (practitioner): intonetic.com
