Preparing students to participate in the global business environment

In a global business environment, technical communication products must meet significant demands of different cultures and languages. The employees, our graduates, who work across time zones, cultures, and languages to create those products, need to prepare for this globally networked professional environment. As academics, how do we educate these students to participate in the global business environment? This panel of professors and students will discuss the benefits, as well as the challenges, of working with faculty and students at a German university to understand the complexities of intercultural technical communication. Two professors will describe how they introduce students to the cultural variables (beliefs, attitudes, and values) that shape the communication process and how they have established cooperative learning experiences with the University of Applied Sciences (HsKA) in Karlsruhe, Germany, to help students translate the theory of intercultural communication into practice. Students will describe the types of products and their experiences working and interacting with HsKA students.