Soft skills such as cultural competence got a boost in the Wall Street Journal from CIO Journal columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who wrote about the skills that execs seek in people who have the hard skills of engineering and business.
One desired trait, seldom taught in schools, is cultural competence as defined in a 2014 working paper by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism as having “a capacity to think, act and move across multiple boundaries of functions, silos and global cultures, including the sometimes insular worlds of engineering, law, and business.”
The report noted that today, when the need for cultural understanding is rising, competence among new graduates seems to be declining. This and similar skills must be mastered in the job. Executives say this is not ideal.
The students who create the guides in the Bias Busters series are learning these skills as they work and we hope that the guides lead readers to have the conversations that will help them become more culturally competent. Order one of our guides and see what we’re talking about.
