Ready for Future International Challenges: Promoting Intercultural Competencies

Over the past years, the increasing networking of the global economy as well as the internationalization at school and work make the need for intercultural competences obvious. While studying or going abroad is often linked with prospects of personal or career growth, many people struggle when it comes to risk associated with operating in unfamiliar markets and cultures, problems that go beyond the conversational level. Especially engineering practice is characterized by an increasing internationalization of work, both through the expansion of multinational organizations and increasing mobility of engineers. Hence intercultural competence is becoming a skill of growing importance of future engineers. The Project "Excellent Teaching and Learning in Engineering Science" at RWTH Aachen University developed an intercultural training to address this challenge. "Excellent Teaching and Learning in Engineering Science" (ELLI 2) is a collaborative project by the RWTH Aachen University, the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum as well as the University Dortmund to continuously improve teaching quality and studying condition. The goal of this two-day extra-module intercultural training which is was introduced in 2013 to train German students for their foreign exchange as well as for foreign guest students. Thereby the training takes a multidimensional look at the cross-cultural issues faced by practitioners working across the greatest cultural distances with the aid of different methods and strategies. It focuses on the key step of translating cultural awareness into systematic problem diagnosis in cross-cultural teamwork and interactions. Hence, the focus lies on teaching learners how to transform culture knowledge into logic to generate alternative causal explanations for unexpected events and behaviour in cross-cultural work interactions. This paper describes the design of the intercultural training as well as the effectiveness of it, which is assessed in an experimental pre-post design, before and after the workshop. Based on the results, it can be concluded that intercultural training can improve students' perception of intercultural competence.