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'Cultural Training’ course content should include everything necessary to help people new to a country, understand and navigate the local culture.

This understanding gives learners an advantage when working in or with a foreign country by equipping them with shortcuts on how to work effectively.

However, it's important that course content meets the needs of the learners. This means that cultural training courses are not all the same.

A cultural training course delivered to a school might be very different to the type of course delivered to a team of business managers. 

In this blog, we’re going to explore the most important topics to include in a Cultural Training course so that if you’re responsible for sourcing a course, you know what to consider.

So, first we’re going to look at some essential topics of any Cultural Training course before giving you some real-life examples.


Did you know we specialize in Cultural Training?

As experts in the field, we like to share!
So at the end of this article you'll find some great links to free resources.


Essential Topics of a Cultural Training Course

Any course, whether about culture or not, needs to be suitable for the audience.

Cultural Training is no different in that it has to be tailored to the needs of the learners; therefore, what is ‘essential’ can vary dramatically.

The most important subjects to cover in the Cultural Training course include:

  1. Self-Awareness: It's important to first emphasise the role of the Cultural Lens and our unique worldview.
  2. Bias and Stereotypes: Next, we should understand the influence of bias and stereotypes. 
  3. Culture: The training course should then move on to what culture is and what it does. 
  4. Values: Next, critical to understanding culture is the role of cultural values and their role in culture clash.
  5. Communication: Differences in communication style is essential to helping learners communicate effectively.
  6. Doing Business: Finally, the course should look at different approaches to business practices, such as meetings, management, teamwork, deadlines, collaboration, negotiations and anything else relevant to the learners.

There may of course be other topics that learners might need to be included in a Cultural Training course. However, these offer a great starting point.

Let’s now look at some examples of topics covered in a few of our free online cultural awareness training courses.


What’s Covered in a Cultural Awareness Course?

Our eLearning course on Cultural Awareness has been designed for professionals working in any sort of culturally diverse environment.

It’s therefore quite generic and offers a great overview of what’s covered in such a course.

 

You can watch a sample of the course video for free below or go over to the course page for more details.



What’s Covered in a Middle East Cultural Training Course?

Within Cultural Training there are many types of training. Some are focused on generic skills such as the Cultural Awareness course above, whereas others are country or region-specific.

To give you an idea of what’s covered in a regional Cultural Training course, let’s look at the topics in our Middle East eLearning course.

 

You can watch a sample of the course video for free below or go over to the course page for more information.



What’s Covered in a Japan Cultural Training Course?

So, you’ve now seen what’s in a Cultural Awareness course and a course on Arab culture, which means we just need to look at an example of a country-specific course.

Below is an outline of the subjects covered in our Japan cultural training course.

 

You can watch a sample of the course video for free below or go over to the course page to learn more.



Cultural Training Resources

We hope you found this information useful.

Below we’ve included some links you may also find useful in designing a cultural training course.


 Blog image by Christina Morillo from Pexels