In my forays of the internet, the two things that seem to generate the most page views are: scantily clad women (and men I suppose, though I suspect they have less of an online pull; unless they are vampires) and advice for job hunting. Having no experience whatsoever with the former, I shall address the latter as it relates to language, via this blog, where an intrepid student of the Common Speech discovers that ideographic-tone mastery is not an automatic pass to wealth and power (and by extension, scantily clad male vampires / women):

The simple fact is however, mastery of Chinese, no matter how good you are, is NOT a golden ticket to employment in the United States.* That is, of course, unless your career goals are purely linguistic in nature (i.e. Chinese teacher, interpreter, or translator). More often than not, expats who learn Chinese and return home, find their way back into the same career (or school) path they had before they ever left for China in the first place.

Why would anyone think that Chinese could be useful? There are after all ~1.35 billion people who can speak the language, and most of them are bilingual in their local pidgin dialect. A much smaller percentage possess barely passable English skills. Of course, an employer can probably meet most staffing requirements by skimming off the top of 0.05*7 million university graduates every year. This teeming mass of humanity is willing to work for USD200 per month, and entrepreneurial enough to manage a farm on the side.

An economics professor of mine once noted that many people interested in ‘helping the developing world’ study language, when a much more effective strategy would be to learn a hard skill, and port that to the developing world (build information infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa or some such). Language assists with these types of engagements, but cannot replace them. As for myself, I can rapidly assemble a small cadre of highly credentialed people who can explain what the socio-legal-economic-ethnographic effects (and post-modernist implications) of fixing that broken water pipe in rural China are; there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that we’d be able to deal with the problem ourselves.

So, what to do? If you’re interested in China specifically, danwei.org and Shanghaiist seem to have interesting job postings from time to time. For general resume advice, Mergers and Inquisitions covers a lot of job search topics that are relevant to numerous fields outside of investment banking. For language, study as much as possible, but do not do so at the expense of other remunerative interests you might have.

• Language does open a lot of opportunities; if someone has other skills to offer. These can be broad: “ability to write coherently and mostly correctly in English” would be one of them, and there is rapidly growing demand for people that fit that description and happen to be bilingual.

• The ability to work in China, in particular, seems to open avenues that wouldn’t necessarily be open if someone stayed in the U.S. For example, I’m reasonably confident that my current ‘employed’ status at the moment is entirely due to being in China.

• Working in or with China, traits that are much more important than a strong command of the language seem to be extreme amounts of patience and humility (in my observations, Taiwanese and overseas Chinese tend to do much worse on these counts; though it may primarily be that they are held to much higher standards.)

• When trying to find a job, though, networking is by far the most useful way to spend your time, and language skills can give you substantive access to a much larger network. Sending signals of intelligence quickly and efficiently is extremely valuable. If you can’t name drop your Ivy League, at least you can say 哦不好意思，我不知道她是你的老婆. Useful that.

So, networking. How to network effectively?

• Be unobtrusive, and don’t mention ‘I need job’ directly unless you have very good relations with the contact in question. For example, if you’re interested in working abroad, write to a contact and ask “what does it take to get a work visa to X?” This will let them know that 1) you are thinking about it, 2) will give them an opportunity to demonstrate their vast knowledge of foreign bureaucracy and people like feeling smart, and 3) signal that you might already have an opportunity, and are therefore an attractive candidate.

• Be interesting: I’m not sure how this is accomplished. Asking a substantive question relating to their field (even if you already know the answer) is a reasonably effective approach. And learn some NLP, I suppose.

Learning a language shouldn’t only be a means to career, and there are numerous other rewarding reasons to commit time to learning something difficult like Mandarin. If that is in fact your motivation, however, you definitely shouldn’t admit it as locals become livid if one says “I came to here and studied your language in order to make lots of money.” Say something about “culture” instead.