Lesson 1: Globalization

Need for Global Competence

James Alder, VP of Operations of Celanese Corporation, stated, "Global competence or a strong interest in becoming globally competent is a clear differentiator in an engineer's ability to progress in his or her career. Gone are the days when someone could be U.S. centric and reach a senior leadership position or even have a relatively secure job...Those that have the interest and capability to move abroad significantly expand their long term career opportunities..." (Parkinson, 2009).

Definition of Global Competence

Global competence is defined as the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary for a person to successfully interact with people from different cultures in order to accomplish a task or goal. Knowledge refers to having the information needed to know how things happen or work. Skills refer to the ability to implement the knowledge that makes things happen or work. Attitudes refer to the disposition to pursue and engage in those actions.

Components of Global Competence

Cultural competence needs to be viewed as a location on a continuum rather than a switch where you either have it or you don't. As you add a competency to your repertoire your cross-cultural competence increases. This increases your ability to interact and collaborate successfully with other cultures. As a note some competencies are quite culture specific. For example, for those from the United States, second language acquisition refers to learning a language other than English. However, for those from a different culture like Mexico or Brazil, second language acquisition and international language acquisition may mean the same thing.

There are five components of global competence. These include: cross-cultural communication, cross-cultural attitudes, world knowledge, cross-cultural teamwork, and engineering specific competence(Ball, et. al., 2011).