Event: East Asian Language Skills and Global Competencies Workshop
Date: Thursday, October 3, 2019
The purpose of the East Asian Language Skills and Global Competencies Workshop was for students majoring or minoring in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean to learn how we can explain the skills and competencies we’ve developed from these majors and minors to future employers and companies. This workshop was the 2nd installation in the East Asian Studies Center’s Professionalization Workshop 2019. It is useful as being a language major, sometimes it is very difficult to explain what skills I have learned and developed beside the obvious, the language I’ve studied. By the end of the workshop, I was better prepared to identify what skills I have learned from my major as well as how to best implement these skills into a resume and future interviews.
During the workshop, we were given sample resumes from language majors showing what skills they had and more importantly, how they were able to use them. Rather than being vague and simply highlighting what skills we have, we were told to present them in a format that shows exactly how we used them and in what manner. Using this format, it explains your experiences while also giving insights into what skills you have, so that there isn’t necessarily a need for an entirely separate section listing skills without any further information.
The workshop also helps me understand what multicultural competencies I’ve gained from being a language major, and how I can explain this to future potential employers as well. This relates to the topic of international affairs simply because you need to be able to understand cultural differences in respectful manners, without trying to make sense of it in terms of your own culture but for what it is in its own terms. Cultural relativism is important for everyone, not just for language majors.