Work Abroad

The United Kingdom is part of the global economic system and the increasing competition from Europe, the US, China, Japan and other developing countries is exerting its pressures on British companies, the local labour market and the graduate job market in particular. Language, cultural skills, mobility and adaptability are cited as valued assets in candidates for positions in many sectors of the economy. Research indicates that 23 per cent of UK companies lose business opportunities due to the lack of multilingual and culturally-aware staff alone (CILT, 2004 and 2007).

IEMS at Coventry University has been set up to tap into this vast potential employment area and help its graduates aquire the skills to gain work experience abroad and become globally-employable. IEMS runs a number of work abroad programmes, both in the EU and elsewhere, which bring students the invaluable experience of working in foreign environments and a real interaction with other cultures, mindsets, traditions and languages.

As Stephen Green - Group Chairman, HSBC Holdings plc - put it at the Universities UK Annual Lecture in January 2009:

HSBC is a multinational company. Typically, we might recruit up to 1,500 graduates onto one of our 70 graduate programmes around the world – in the UK last year we recruited some 400 graduates. For those jobs, globally, we receive almost 100,000 applications. As 90 per cent of graduates get a 2.2 or 2.1 and will therefore meet our academic criteria, it takes something else to stand out from the crowd.

It’s not just about academic skills, it's about a more fundamental need for us all to gain a broader and deeper understanding of the history, culture and language of countries whose influence is growing so huge. Recent recruits include a graduate who taught English and Spanish in Guatemala, one who ran a restaurant and another who worked at the Beijing Paralympics.  These and many activities provide hard evidence of energy, motivation, leadership.