Cross-cultural training as part of policy and business strategies to prepare Indonesian IT engineers in global job market competition

Indonesian IT engineers need to have both hard and soft skills to be ready in global market competition in term of work force. Hard skills are the technical expertise related to their field of work. On the other hand, soft skills are also the important part of the engineers' capability including communication, creativity, adaptability, collaboration and leadership. The purpose of this paper is to develop theoretical review of how to educate Indonesian IT engineers to be ready to face global job market competition by the use of cross-cultural training program in the university in Indonesia. This study reports the results of a web-based survey of Indonesian expatriate engineers addressing their knowledge, experience and perceptions of working in multicultural working environment in some engineering projects. The output of this paper is a framework of cross-cultural training as the supplementary material in the university curriculum in engineering education in Indonesia.