Digital Transformation and Lifelong Learning: Supporting Self-initiated Intercultural Competence Assessment and Development

Creating a harmonious diverse cultural workplace thrives on the intercultural understandings among co-workers in the organization. The readiness for individual to operate in multicultural settings could be innate or learnt. The question is how are digital tools and resources suporting individuals to develop, consolidate and manage their Intercultural Competencies (ICC) as a self-initiated learning pursuit. Tallinn University has two key schools (Humanities and Digital Technologies) with the capacity to look into the subject under discussion and answer questions about ICC and digital technologies. To this end, the project seeks to bring students together as interdisciplinary project teams to tap into the expert knowledge found in the two Schools (Humanities and Digital Technologies), to explore the intercultural competence needs at the workplace or in organizations. Even though the project is to offer an opportunity for interdisciplinary project engagement among students, the overarching intent is to contribute to reinforcing the position of TLU as a major player in the pursuit of social cohesion policy implementation in the Estonian society. The project is motivated by the following documents, i) the National Integration Agenda of the Government of Estonia (Ministry of Culture/Republic of Estonia, n.d.), ii) Estonia Smart vision 2035 (Ministry of Education and Research/Republic of Estonia, 2019) and iii) Tallinn University’s Development Plan (Tallinn University, 2020) which seek to promote and sustain cultural harmony among people. To make the project practical and reflective in building cultural cohesion among multinational teams, project participants will be drawn from Tallinn University and the University of Ghana in West Africa. These multi-national and across country teams will work together to find answers to Intercultural Competence Competence questions and needs at the workplaces or in organizations. It will further attempt to provide models that will use digital tools and resources to support and facilitate a self-initiated Intercultural Competence Assessment and Development.