Equipping Graduates for the Global Stage: Constructing an International Employability Skills Framework

There are a variety of aspects to the concept of international employability depending on where students are intending to find employment:

• The first set relates to those students who aim to remain in their home state but want to develop skills which ready them for a role with an international corporation or International Nongovernmental Organisation (INGO) in their home state. In this case students will live in a familiar culture but will require skills that enable them to work or volunteer for an international organisation. Here there is some cultural adaption required, but it is limited to the work environment.
• Second, there are those students who aim to work abroad. Either for economic or other reasons they travel to find work and settle in a foreign country to work. In this case the student will need to acquire both the skills required by a foreign employer, as well as the ability to live and work in a cultural context potentially very different from their own. Here there is considerable cultural adaption required. Both the work environment and the living environment will need specific skills.
• Third, there are those students who aim to work for an international corporation (a multi-national enterprise, MNE) or an INGO in a foreign country and not just any employer. In this case, once the culture of the MNE or the INGO is learned the student can move across the globe and remain within the culture of the MNE or the INGO. They will need to learn skills of cultural adaptation in order to live in different cultures at different times. This will enable them to settle in any culture whilst working for the same organisation.
• Fourth, there are those students who aim to work transnationally. For example, for the United Nations or other international organisations. This requires a very different approach since, there is a sense in which the student will be lifting themselves out of an understanding of contemporary cultural or national context to live and work in an international community. Such a community may have its own cultural expectations that are more than a summation of the nation states involved.

The AdvanceHE literature review on employability (2021: section 11, esp. 11.3) explores the impact of transnational study on employability. It highlights that, according to Berdrow and Bird (2018: 136): ‘There is a demand for individuals who think transnationally and implement cross-border thinking’. However, research demonstrates that it is easier to obtain employment in the home state rather than in a host state, regardless of skills developed during study abroad. This issue arises from a variety of factors, including that home students are better informed as to how to gain employment in their home state and have stronger contacts there. An international employability framework would therefore need to incorporate skills training on how to identify the steps necessary to find employment abroad or in an international context.

Warwick University on their GlobalPeople@Work website (Warwick University, n.d.) refer to the need for the capacity to work in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. They highlight the linguistic challenges to referring to the types of skills needed to work in an international context, identifying that such skills are referred to variously as intercultural competence, cultural intelligence, global dexterity, intercultural effectiveness, cultural capacity, global competence. For the sake of clarity, it is posited here that whichever terms are used, it is necessary to determine which context the student is aiming for. But it is also important for the student to be aware that what they are aiming for may not necessarily be what they end up doing. There is therefore a need for concurrently developing adaptive skills across the different contexts, while focusing on the preferred contexts.  

In light of the different types of international employment which a student is likely to consider, it might be useful in an international employability framework to distinguish between the international contexts in which a student might want to work. Namely, international organisational cultural skills (a student working in their home state but for an INGO or MNE); inter-cultural skills (a student moving to another culture to work); global skills (a student who wants to work for an INGO or MNE in any nation); and international skills (a student who wants to work beyond national boundaries). Some cross-context skills would also be useful.