Cross-cultural educational needs in SE

The common trend of companies today is to operate in global markets, to sustain business growth and to achieve bigger markets. Even start-up companies want to reach global markets rapidly, because of the home country´s small markets and because their products or services are for very narrow i.e. niche markets. Globalization creates challenges for a company´s human recruitment unit. They have to find appropriate employees a company´s global multicultural teams and rapidly alternating projects. Employees need to use multiple collaborative tools flexibly to handle complex projects and their communication needs. Employees should have a deep cultural awareness so to avoid cultural conflicts in multicultural projects and in their team. This paper examines what kind of qualities employees should have in global software companies nowadays, with a particular focus on cross-cultural issues. These qualities are studied from four different points of view, recognized global software development issues, and from the viewpoints of product, process, and future work. The aim is to discuss the cultural educational needs there might be in the universities offering software engineering, in order to offer better employees for labor markets. This paper is based on a literature review.