Cultural Competence Is The Key To Your International Career.

Chinese students and university graduates are more competitive in the world economy than ever before. The next growth opportunity for these young people may be cross-cultural education.

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The more opportunities we have, the better we can discover the diversity of culture.

With the strengthening of China's economic internationalization, the growing middle class gradually realized the importance of English and began to invest more in learning English.

At the same time, the number of overseas students in China exceeds that in any other country, and over 90% of them are studying at their own expense, and the main destinations are English speaking countries.

Chinese enterprises (such as Alibaba, HUAWEI, etc.) seek overseas operations and attract.

It is also hoped that candidates will have a higher level of English, and some enterprises have begun offering English courses to their employees.

With the continuous improvement of the English proficiency of Chinese graduates and employees, cultural competence has become a new challenge for pnational work.

Proficiency in English enables Chinese adults to communicate with people from all over the world, but language learning is far from enough, and it is necessary to learn to interact with people from different cultures.

Cultural competence refers to the ability to recognize, appreciate and integrate the cultural diversity of nations, languages and histories of the world.

To improve cultural competence, we need to immerse ourselves in different cultures through reading, film and social media, but the most effective one is travel.

However, those who want to know others must first know themselves.

Humans are born with internal bias and out of group prejudice, that is, they are more interested in people who are similar to themselves, and tend to be prejudiced against people who are different from themselves.

Within group and out group bias can be expressed in terms of race (Chinese and white), nationality (Chinese and American), gender (male and female), and even geographical (Beijing and Shanghai).

We know more about people than we do in different groups. Therefore, when communicating with individuals outside the group, we often assume an inherent image to supplement our lack of cognition on individuals outside the group.

However, these inherent images, such as the independence of the Americans, the Japanese are more reserved, and the women are more weak, are somewhat biased and misleading, though some of them are true.

We must be aware of our prejudice and the fact that it affects our communication with people from different backgrounds.

Ignorance caused by prejudice may lead to serious mistakes in cross-cultural communication.

In addition to recognizing individual prejudices, we must learn from different countries.

In China, the way of greeting between acquaintances is usually shaking hands; bowing in Japan; embracing in America; kissing two times in some parts of Spain; kissing three times in other areas.

From table manners to workplace norms, the degree of respect for the elderly and the hierarchy of the society are different.

The more we understand these subtle differences, the better we can adapt ourselves to different cultures.