Meeting the Needs of Migrants in Flanders: the Role of the Job-seeker

One of the most pressing concerns for migrants is in finding employment. Aside from many bureaucratic steps required in the process and occasional vocational trainings, job-seekers also need to learn to navigate the job search process itself, which includes actions such as applying to the National Employment Agency, answering job applications, negotiating contract conditions, and networking. A number of these tasks do require the use of the Dutch language and some among them, for instance conducting a job interview, are linguistically very challenging. However, research about the tasks involved in the job-seeking process is quite limited. In other words, we do not know which tasks migrant-job-seekers actually perform in Dutch, how well they are performing them and in which areas they could use additional training. The aim of this research is to fill in those gaps. By conducting a language needs analysis of the job-seekers in Flanders, involving other relevant stakeholders such as experts of the National Employment Agency, HR recruiters in companies and interim agencies as well as experts of Dutch as Second Language, we aim to discover their objective needs, i.e. tasks that they perform in Dutch, where their lacks or deficiencies lie, as well as their subjective needs or wants. Aside from the clear practical value, the research will also contribute to methodological issues in applied linguistics related to language needs analysis.