Chase Dutch Before Dutch Chases You
Why professionals working in English in Belgium get filtered out of jobs they are qualified for
An IT engineer I know has been in Belgium for ten years. He has never needed French or Dutch. He works in English, like most of his sector, and for a decade that was enough.
His contract ended recently. He started looking, and found that many of the roles he is qualified for now list Dutch under eligibility criteria, which means the filter is applied before anyone reads what he can actually do. He has the skills for the job and no way to get his CV past the first screen.
Another man I met has a similar shape of story. Product development, ten years at a multinational here, then several years working remotely for a company based in an English-speaking country. He speaks French, among other languages. His sector is automotive, and automotive in Belgium runs largely in Dutch. The sector is also not in great health at the moment, which means fewer openings and more applicants for each one. He is back on the Belgian market for the first time after a decade, and the language he does not have is the one his industry works in.
I watched this change from a conversation table
I have been going to a conversation table for French and Dutch in Brussels since 2018, and running it as co-organiser since 2022. The table is older than my involvement in it by at least five years.
Before 2020, the people who came to practise were overwhelmingly interns from the EU institutions, and they came for French. That group thinned out and then stopped appearing. Some of that is on us: we recruited through Facebook, and Facebook stopped reaching them. So I cannot tell you they left because French stopped being useful.
What I can tell you is who took their seats. For the last four years the room has been full of people learning Dutch. Same city, same table, different language.
"But they don't really need it"
One of those men told me repeatedly something I hear constantly: that the Dutch requirement is often nominal. Once you are inside, the team switches to English anyway, and the line in the ad was something HR added.
He is probably right. It changes nothing for him. The requirement does its work at the application stage, and the application stage is the only one he has access to. Whether the company genuinely needs Dutch on the job is a question you get to ask after you have been hired.
Saying the requirement is not real is a way of making the obstacle feel smaller. The obstacle stays exactly the same size.
You do not get to choose when it becomes urgent
A student of mine started Dutch after a few years here. He started because his contract was coming up for renewal in spring, and he wanted to be ready by then. A reasonable plan: a real deadline, and enough runway to meet it.
Then something changed at work, and he is job hunting now instead of next spring.
The timeline is not yours. Contracts end early, sectors shrink, a restructure or a lost client moves your deadline twelve months closer. Language is one of the few things you cannot compress in an emergency. You can rewrite a CV in an evening. You cannot get to a working level of Dutch in one.
What early looks like
Learning a language before you need it professionally is a completely different activity from learning it under pressure.
No exam date. No HR deadline. Fifteen minutes a day, allowed to be slow, allowed to be boring. Two years of that beats three months of panic, and it costs you far less of your life. It also spares you the worst version of this, which is studying while you are unemployed and firing off applications you already know will be filtered out.
This is why I push my partner on his Dutch, and he is not job hunting yet. He is an electrical engineer going to move to Belgium soon. I don't want to see him in the same situation of the other three sirs.
The point
If you have been in Belgium a few years, working in English, telling yourself you will deal with the language when it becomes necessary, look at what that actually means. English was enough when you arrived, and that was true, but Dutch may become necessary on a day you do not choose, usually the day you have the least time, money and patience to do anything properly.