Fideua

Hey, I'm one of your ACI colleagues from another booth.

Which languages do you find the hardest? I currently work from French, Spanish and English, and out of those I find French to be the hardest because their way of thinking suits me less and I sometimes find it hard to distinguish words, to hear everything correctly. I have considered adding Portuguese for a while (am at a C1 level now), but I often find it almost impossible to understand in spoken form, did you experience the same problem? And if so: does it ever get better? :)

And maybe the opposite question can be fun too: Do you have a clear favorite among your working languages, and why?

Do you still get to do a lot of traveling? I've heard amazing stories from older colleagues of all the interesting places they got to work in, but from what I've gathered, our booth rarely gets to travel outside the seats of the EP anymore.

This is exactly how it is. First time I've seen it explained so clearly and briefly.

Just a small remark that might help you: the demand for interpreters isn't very high right now in most booths, so it might be very difficult to start in that area, but there does seem to be a relatively steady demand for translators/lawyer-linguists, so if you're just interested in languages and the EU, that could be a career choice to consider.

And general EU staff, of course, but they tend to require a knowledge of more than one major EU language as well. You can find a lot of info on recent job openings and requirements on the EPSO website, just to get a feel of what it would take.

That should be pretty useful, for a lot of jobs the main requirements are a master's degree (often any will do) and knowledge of at least two EU languages (generally your mother tongue and one major language, sometimes two major languages and extra languages are a plus).

You can check out the job openings on the EPSO website to see what the requirements for specific jobs are.