Theme: CLIC: Inter-Communication skills

Culture shock isn’t necessarily a negative experience, but most students and researchers (both native and non-native speakers!) will experience the negative side effects of it in some form or shape when living abroad or when working in your home country but working across cultures face-to-face or remotely. Even a very good command of a language doesn’t guarantee an easy cultural ‘transition’ – one can master a foreign language to the proficiency level, but there is more to communication than speaking the same language.

In this online workshop, you will gain a better understanding of the culture shock, its impact on day-to-day interactions and how to deal with it.

Have you ever struggled with other students’ or colleagues’ styles of communication, wondered why some people seem to use more formal language, or be more direct than others? Culture plays a big part in how we communicate and adjusting to the cultural communication norms means more than learning a foreign language. Join our workshop to learn more about the importance of cultural competence in interactions - find out more about the impact of cultural (national, regional, interdisciplinary etc.) differences on management styles, team dynamics, communication and more.

In this never-changing world, adaptability is one of the most valuable skills for your time in Cambridge and also for your future employment. In this session, you will discuss the requirements of ‘the new normal’ – the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous reality that requires the right mindset to support you as an ongoing part of your professional life. You will learn how to address VUCA and how to turn the adversities we’re all facing and turn them into opportunities.

Technical skills are a must-have, but a new skillset is emerging when it comes to finding the right candidate for employment. Those harder to teach and quantify skills, the so called soft or interpersonal skills, have become critical in the recruitment process of global companies and are tested at various stages of job applications.

In this workshop, you will reflect on:

1. What are soft skills and why you need them?
2. How do you know which ones you have?
3. How can you demonstrate them to your future employers?
4. How to develop them?

Diversity has well been established as a key driver of creative solutions, innovations, and superior business performance. Creating inclusive workplaces to harness the power of diversity takes knowledge, experience, and open-mindedness. However, our biases often influence our decision-making without us even realising. The good news is that biases - towards genders, cultures, ethnicities, sexual orientations and so on - are learnt, and therefore can be unlearnt.

Severe imbalances in genders and ethnicities, non-inclusive and discriminatory practices are some of the challenges most industries and companies suffer when it comes to diversity. We will explore how unconscious bias could be a major underlying cause of such challenges, and what you can do to “unlearn” such unconscious biases, in order to effectively reap the benefits of diversity.