IT professionals with foreign language skills, and speakers of Turkish, Greek and Eastern European languages across the job spectrum, emerged as two of the most highly sought-after candidate groups at the Language Recruitment Fair this month.

The event, at Olympia 2 in London, was the first dedicated to language recruitment, and featured both recruiters and blue-chip employers including health and hygeine company Kimberly-Clark and news agency Reuters.

Aytac Irfan, managing director of job board TopLanguageJobs.com, has seen an increased demand in recent months for language skills in the technical sector.

“The demand for IT skills with a language is growing each year,” he said. “However, we are seeing that the number of candidates on the market is staying constant.”

Qualified translators are set to be in increased demand after an industry body warned that a shortage of trained interpreters is causing a threat to justice.

In particular, there is a dearth of Chinese and Arabic and African dialect interpreters.

“It’s not uncommon for a police force in Leicestershire to ring at 2am to get an Arabic interpreter from Cornwall because they can’t find one locally,” said Alan Wheatley, general secretary of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting.