Intercultural skills that university graduates and businesses in Europe need today

Learning several languages, being open-minded, expressing an understanding for other cultures while demonstrating a willingness to network and collaborate, are essential intercultural skills for graduates seeking employment with European businesses and employers, says new research by academics at London South Bank University (LSBU), conducted jointly with three European and one other UK university.
In this seminar, we report on the results from our two graduate and employer surveys and interviews in the first part and in the second part we outline the teaching and training resources that we have developed as part of this project to support educators, trainers, and businesses in developing these core intercultural skills for university graduates and employees. The research was part of our Erasmus+ grant funded by the European Commission on ‘Developing the cross-cultural skills of graduates in response to the needs of European enterprise’ (2019 – 2022, Grant ID: 2019-1-UK01-KA203-061672). The comparative research was conducted in Belgium, Sweden, Turkey, and the UK and is a collaboration between the University of Worcester (Project lead, UK), London South Bank University (UK), UC Leuven-Limburg (Belgium), Halmstad University (Sweden) and Bursa Uludağ University (Turkey).