Language Opportunities

Your Language Skills Count Most When Everything Is on the Line.

In our rapidly changing world, intelligence priorities can shift as countries and languages increase in importance. To stay ahead of these critical changes, it’s important that our employees have the language abilities and cultural expertise necessary to handle both emerging and current national security challenges.

Whether your background is in cyber security, economics, logistics, or something else entirely, there is a place to use your language skills here to help keep our country safe.

The CIA offers monetary bonuses for those who meet proficiency requirements in one or more of our mission critical languages. Visit the Foreign Language Incentive Program page to see a full list of languages that qualify for our incentives, and see our Foreign Language Proficiency Scale page to learn more about how we gauge a candidate or employee’s proficiency.

Foreign Language Incentive Program

Foreign language skills are critical to much of the work we do across the CIA. Our Foreign Language Incentive Program provides monetary bonuses to new and current employees with excellent foreign language skills who meet proficiency requirements.

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Foreign Language Proficiency Scale

We need professionals with language abilities in a wide variety of positions across the CIA. In order to properly gauge a candidate or employee’s proficiency in a foreign language, we use the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale.

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Intelligence Language Institute

The Intelligence Language Institute (ILI) is the premier language school in the Intelligence Community.

Mission: Support CIA’s intelligence mission by enabling and enhancing foreign language skills anytime, anywhere.

Vision: Mission-Focused Language Learning: Anytime, Anywhere

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