Preparing business graduates for a multicultural workforce

What is it about?

The paper explores how higher education institutions, and business schools in particular, can better prepare graduates to meet employers’ expectations for intercultural competencies in an increasingly globalised and diverse workplace. Drawing on 102 qualitative interviews with business students and employers in the UK, Belgium, Sweden and Turkey, the study compares the supply of intercultural skills from graduates with the demand expressed by employers. Building on seven well-established competencies—cultural empathy, cognitive flexibility, conscientiousness, social initiative, emotional stability, open-mindedness, and willingness to tolerate ambiguity—the paper propose an eighth dimension, digital competencies for intercultural collaboration, to reflect modern workplace realities. The work proposes an Intercultural Competencies Framework, which includes three types of learning activities to help educators and employers build tailored training and curriculum to address the eight intercultural competencies identified in the work.

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Why is it important?

By combining perspectives from both students and employers across diverse European contexts, the work highlights a mismatch between graduate capabilities and employer needs. The paper highlights the importance of digital competencies for intercultural collaboration in modern workplace environments, in addition to traditional intercultural competencies required for effective intercultural communication. The paper provides a framework that higher education and employers can implement to develop the intercultural competencies required, moving beyond purely theoretical models.