The main purpose of the survey and the interviews was to explore the current situ-ation in working life, to find out what skills needed in virtual communicsitu-ation in English one wishes to improve and, in addition, to find out if or how
understand-ing cultural differences influences the virtual communication strategies. Below, these results will be discussed from the point of view of teaching at HEIs.
According to the results, the most important skills are related to virtual synchro-nous interactions. The three first communication skills the respondents want to improve were negotiation skills in virtual communication, managing virtual group interactions and conversational skills. This result indicates that virtual interaction and collaboration skills in working life have become more important as the use of different video conferencing channels, such as Skype for Business or Adobe Con-nect, has become a part of everyday work at all levels of organisation. The results also indicate that the importance of virtual negotiations in international business communication is expected to increase also in the future. Altogether, 56.9 per cent found it important to develop the skills needed in handling negotiations.
The older age group wanted to improve their conversation skills more that the younger ones. This might partly depend on the fact that internationality and social networking are already a part of the younger generation’s everyday life and, they are more confident in communicating in foreign languages than the older genera-tion.
Women’s attitude towards developing one’s communication skills was clearly more positive than men’s who did not see any need to improve their skills. This raises an interesting question about if it is due to the small number of male respondents or is it indicative of a general attitude difference: women are generally speaking more willing to develop their skills and appreciate communication skills and effective communication more.
Virtual communication between people representing different cultural back-grounds and interacting in a foreign language is challenging and to succeed in cross-cultural communication situations in working life people tend to change their communication style in order to be correctly understood. When the partici-pants have different linguistic or cultural backgrounds people change the way they communicate e.g. by speaking more slowly, simplifying their language and using supporting gestures.
To be able to provide our students with the skills required in modern working life, we should, first of all, find common understanding of what we mean with
com-munication and comcom-munication competences in relation to teaching and what the most relevant skills needs in working life are at the moment and in the future.
Secondly, communication skills should be visible already at the level of the curric-ula. Communication skills should be defined as concrete and measurable learning outcomes, which means that they must yield credits and be explicitly described in the assessment criteria.
Thirdly, in the current globalising world, communication skills should be taught, in addition to Finnish (or Swedish) at least in English, which is used as a lingua franca in international contexts.
At the higher education level it is not enough to rely on the assumption that stu-dents already manage communicating through virtual media and foreign languages at work, because communicating virtually in their private lives or being able to communicate with friends and acquaintances in a foreign language does not equal to the skills needed in a professional context. Working life communication can take place either synchronously or asynchronously and the importance of the for-mer one is increasing. It was obvious that the respondents and interviewees in the study had realised that developing their virtual synchronous discussion and ne-gotiation skills is an important part of their professional competences. To be able to meet the future needs of working life HEIs have to take this into account at a practical level.
The need for good language and communication skills as well as for cultural un-derstanding comes up in a number of surveys conducted among industry and com-merce as well as in the social sector, and was also confirmed by the current study.
However, in spite of the acknowledged need for these competences, teaching of them has been cut and reduced significantly in the recent years, especially at UAS-es. One of the strengths of the education at the universities of applied sciences is the close contacts with working life and encouraging students to build networks with it already during the studies. Building national and international networks, however, requires communication, interest and motivation: small grammatical or lexical errors can be forgiven, but if the message is interpreted in a wrong way or the behaviour is interpreted as disrespectful from the point of view of the recipient, it is hard to mend.
Conclusions
One of the strategic aims of the UASes is to support regional development in close contact with working life. To reach this aim, UASes have to anticipate the future professional competence requirements regarding the changing operational environ-ments. Virtual communication takes place in a global setting and is not restricted to the management level employees. Therefore, integrating communication and lan-guage skills and understanding cultural differences into the teaching and curricula of professional studies is necessary. The integration should simulate authentic virtual communication situations in English and the virtual communication, language and cultural skills should form a concrete and measurable part of the curricula.
The present study focussed on the skills people wanted to improve – not on what they should improve i.e. on what are the most common reasons causing misunder-standings in virtual working life communication situations. Studying this could be an interesting subject for future research.
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