5 Essential Workplace Skills for International Business

China Case Study: Effectively leveraging skillsets for competitive advantage.

Over the course of the last seven years we have provided work skills training to numerous companies, located right across Mainland China and outside. Despite the varied requirements of our clients - both branches of foreign businesses and local enterprises - we became aware of a pattern emerging in terms of key skillsets requested repeatedly for local staff needing to deal with overseas clients and colleagues.

Whilst there are always ongoing general requirements for cross-cultural awareness, sensitivity, and improved understanding when dealing with foreign business associates, our clients’ repeated training choices have highlighted the core essential skills (five in total) that their people - from general employees to management, and both new hires and experienced senior staff - require to be able to effectively function on a day-to-day basis within an internationally facing workplace. The five skills are, in themselves, nothing new - the challenge lies in effectively configuring them to the international arena.

There are numerous reasons why companies in China need their staff to be proficient, and maintain ongoing proficiency, in essential skills when engaging with foreign clients and colleagues. Some notable cases in point include:

·?????? Global market expansion

·?????? Enhancing competitive advantage

·?????? Building multilingual workforces

·?????? Enhancing negotiation and conflict resolution

·?????? Supporting international project management

·?????? Fostering innovation and knowledge sharing

·?????? Adapting to varied business practices.

For any of the above reasons, Chinese based enterprises currently involved with overseas business, or seeking to become involved overseas, need to focus on the following five core skillsets for the sake of commercial efficiency and effective returns from their people: presentation skills, cross-cultural communication skills, meeting skills, written communication skills, daily negotiation and transactional skills.

Case Study: 12 Week Essential Skills Programs, Suzhou and Shanghai

Since the start of Q4 in 2023 we have worked with a major Chinese client in the communications manufacturing sector. They are a domestic company and already have extensive global partnerships with foreign businesses; including some internationally famous household names.

We were tasked to create a short, but immersive, skills development course to be delivered primarily in English, but with bilingual materials and adaptable to full Chinese language delivery. The target audience was Chinese staff across all departments based at various offices across Mainland China, as well as for some key staff due to be posted to overseas locations on short-term assignments.

It was decided to merge the essential five skills into an intensive, 12 week program; including both live and online components and with customisation of each component to focus not just on language capabilities, but on the actual skills required in commonly encountered scenarios within international commercial situations.

In addition, the English language component focused on attaining comprehensive understanding of industry-specific and business-related English vocabulary, phrases, and expressions, and enhanced speaking proficiency when using industry and business English in the workplace. Overall the aim was to achieve a higher level of bilingual proficiency within the specific industry sector.

A major challenge was making a short 12 week program worthwhile in terms of sufficient and measurable learning outcomes for the client, as well as overcoming scheduling and geographical issues.

Our solution was to offer a weekly face-to-face training interaction and skills practice at the client’s offices in Suzhou, together with an immersive set of daily tasks, tests, and practices across the rest of the week - all supporting and enhancing the weekly live training topics and practicing all four linguistic skills - speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

The online component has been fully developed in-house by us from our own resources – leveraging automated AI technology and capabilities in a WeChat-based mini-program that works on every participant’s phone. As a result of this, we have been able to offer up to six days of extra fully customised, measurable training and practice every week to reach all registered participants. Additionally, in-house development has meant that the entire cost to our client of the combined weekly offline and online program is only the equivalent of three or four hours of live training per week. ?

For each of the five core skills involved in the course, we needed to look beyond the language learning component to consider what a Chinese business professional should specifically need to know about a foreign counterpart’s likely attitudes, values, and common behavioural patterns (identified by client selected countries and cultures); together with their potential actions and reactions with regard to these. These points were then factored into each skillset.

Some specific areas addressed for each of the five core skills include:

Presentation Skills: Planning, developing, and preparing presentations for specific foreign audiences, effective communication techniques for the start, main body, and conclusion of presentations, how and when to handle questions.

Cross-Cultural Communication Skills: Hofstede’s national cultural norms (client specified), Trompenaars’ interpersonal and business dynamics (client specified), cultural impacts on communication, business practices, social interactions, high and low context language cultures.

Meeting Skills: Techniques for full meeting participation, presenting arguments, giving and requesting opinions, levels of agreement or disagreement, interrupting, clarifying, suggesting, persuading, compromising.

Written Communication Skills: Techniques to organise, begin, and conclude messages, getting messages opened and read, persuasion in writing, effective requests and replies, following up, saying no, complaint handling.

Workplace Negotiation and Transactional Skills: Day-to-day workplace negotiation and transactional skills for effective functioning in workplaces, building rapport and trust, avoiding cognitive bias, building consensus, adaptive strategies.

The overall effectiveness of the ‘Workplace Skills for International Business’ course can best be measured by the successful completion of Phase #1 in Suzhou earlier in 2024, current delivery of Phase #2 in Shanghai, and planning for Phases #3 and #4 at both locations. In a global economy facing numerous challenges, having a workforce proficient in targeted international business skills, not just the language requirements, gives a business a clear competitive edge.

Shaun Corrigan is CEO of BMC Partnership - a Chinese-British owned business, based in Shanghai since 2018. Please contact him directly for details of a full range of market tested, fully customised business training products and internationally accredited courses - delivered in English or Chinese. WeChat: Vivatrex22? / Email: [email protected]

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