Building career skills through virtual exchange

Abstract

As globalization expands and interactions between people increase around the world, organizations need individuals with skills that are not only acquired from traditional curricula. Furthermore, the World Economic Forum has noted that, by 2025, 97 million new jobs will be created with the need for soft skills such as leadership, intercultural fluency, and teamwork. Therefore, higher education institutions may need to develop high-impact pedagogies with internationalized curriculums that bring results beyond classrooms and articulate the link between internationalization and employability. Business educators identified these career success skills through a virtual exchange project known as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) in two pairs of courses, Thailand-USA and the Netherlands-USA. Students from Queens College, City University of New York in the U.S. (n=54), Assumption University in Thailand (n=22), and The Hague University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands (n=19) engaged in a shared assignment across borders through COIL. Using discussions, questionnaires with a five-point Likert scale, and regression analysis, authors discovered that, by using virtual exchange in higher education instruction with an innovative COIL project that included intercultural communication, students build competencies that employers seek. Students specifically enhanced their ability to speak publicly (oral communications), to interact respectfully with all people (intercultural fluency), and to identify their strengths relevant to career goals (career management). The objective of this study is to encourage university leadership to promote and prioritize COIL in order to increase content knowledge and employability.