Organizations look for new and increasingly global and international business models and increase their relationships with other cultures. Companies are therefore looking for executive profiles that prioritize availability, mobility, and adaptability to different cultural environments. Considering that, this chapter aims to 1) identify transversal and intercultural competences developed by students during their short stay abroad and 2) examine how these competences can help students integrate the world of work. Based on qualitative and quantitative analyses, the researchers find evidence that international experience is an efficient mechanism for strengthening transversal and intercultural competences, but that these competences are then under-exploited when job-hunting.
TopIntroduction
Industry 4.0 marks a new era of transition to strong industrial transformation and various new managerial strategies and dynamics. These new dynamics are pushing organizations to look for new and increasingly global and international business models (Switzerland Global Entreprise, 2016), and consequently to increase their relationships with other cultures (internationalization of activities, alliances, mergers, etc.). Therefore, companies are looking for executive profiles which prioritize availability, mobility, and adaptability to different cultural environments. In this sense, transversal and intercultural skills complement technical and academic skills and can be a strong asset for optimizing employability. International student mobility offers a powerful platform to develop or strengthen transversal and intercultural skills, due to the fact that it enables students to benefit from experience gained far from home. Essentially, it invites students to engage with other forms of alterity.
Preliminary studies examined the outcomes of students’ international experiences such as personality fluctuations (Miller-Perrin & Thompson, 2010), career path (Ingraham & Peterson, 2004), language ability (e.g., Baker-Simemoe et al., 2014) and intercultural skills and evidenced their potential to help grasp the deeper meaning of cultural elements in transformation (Martin, 2017, p. 5). Even though international mobility effectively contributes to the development of learning outcomes, the transfer, categorization and development of these skills remains a difficult exercise (Coudret-Laut, 2016), especially for transversal (Breton, 2016) and intercultural (Blons-Pierre, 2016) knowledge. Higher Education systems are heterogeneous worldwide, opposing private and public institutions (Börjesson & Broady, 2016) and variously implementing students’ international mobility. In Europe, business models in Higher Education Institutions require the implementation of international partnerships to stay competitive (Lichy et al., 2016). Contrary to the major trends, Switzerland exports few students abroad with a net rate equal to -0.18 in 2012 (3,897 inbound Erasmus students vs. 2,714 outbound Erasmus students; Gérard & Sanna, 2017); which questions the practices implemented.
International mobility implemented by the Swiss Higher Education Institution, on which the authors focus in this paper, allows students to complete a stay abroad during their studies. The analysis of this method derives from one specific University of Applied Sciences and aims to:
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Identify the competences developed by students through international mobility and put their intercultural dimension into perspective with theoretical frames of reference;
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Put in evidence the links between the competences developed or reinforced during the stay and the concept of employability.
Three methodological approaches are used in a temporal analysis. First, the researchers conducted a review of the covering letters written by the students before their stay. Second, they reviewed the questionnaires which the mobility candidates completed on their return from abroad. Third, they conducted semi-structured interviews with six students and nine former students in order to gauge, through their discourse, the skills they believe they had developed through this experience and its potential benefits on their occupational integration.
The paper begins by introducing the core concepts in this research. The authors then describe the methodology used and report the results of the study. Discussion then puts the results into perspective with the reference literature to suggest areas of improvement.
TopTheoretical Foundations
The following review of the literature does not aim to be exhaustive, but to introduce the main concepts on which the study is based. After having addressed the notion of transversal competence, the authors apprehend it through the prism of interculturality. They then consider the kind of skills developed in the context of the international student experience and how they connect with employability.