Program Overview

Many careers today involve working in multi-cultural teams, with colleagues overseas, or undertaking business travel. Do you have the cross-cultural skills needed to succeed in the graduate workplace? Feedback from industry regularly highlights the need not just for graduates with excellent technical skills, but for well-rounded graduates with strong people skills and emotional intelligence.

The objective of this program is to enhance the intercultural competencies of our soon-to-be Engineering and IT graduates and to provide an opportunity for dialogue across students from different backgrounds.

Students will attend two workshops run by cultural communication experts Project Global Citizen along with University of Melbourne staff. Following the workshops, students will work in small groups on a brief project to demonstrate the application of cross-cultural skills in a professional setting relevant to Engineering or IT.

This program will be eligible for Melbourne Plus accreditation under the People Leadership category. Get a digital credential to enhance your LinkedIn profile!

The students whose project best demonstrates this will win the 2026 GCCP-AOTULE Prize: the opportunity to represent the Faculty of Engineering & IT on a fully funded trip to the 2026 AOTULE Student Conference, hosted by Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand in early December.

AOTULE is a consortium of highly-ranked Asian and Australasian universities, whose Annual General Meeting and Student Conference takes place at one of the member university’s campuses each year. This year, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok will be the host. Students travel to the student conference where they have the opportunity to work in groups on a mini-project with students from various member universities as well as participating in industry visits and local cultural activities. FEIT will nominate two students from the Global Career Competencies program to attend and represent us.

Please note: Students travelling to the AOTULE Student Conference must be enrolled in Semester 2. We welcome GCCP applications from students who are finishing their degrees mid-year, however if you are completing mid-year and you are part of the winning pair, please not that you would unfortunately be ineligible for the conference prize. In the case that member(s) of the winning pair were unable to travel, or chose not to, we would select members of the runner up pair via random selection.

“In my opinion it’s a great opportunity for students to learn how to interact with people and build teamwork skills”. – Student participant in the 2024 program.