Education Abroad Develops Cultural Agility

• Students stretch their understanding of other cultures when they live with host families, attend school with host nationals, and observe how the rhythms of daily life play out in business relationships.
• As students connect with peers from different cultures, they learn to adjust their communication, leadership, and teamwork styles.
• When students reflect on their experiences and rethink their assumptions, they begin to see the cultural differences that lie beneath surface similarities.

 
Thriving in global business takes more than technical know-how. Today’s business students need cultural agility—the ability to adapt quickly, collaborate across differences, and navigate unfamiliar environments with confidence. This capability requires them to cultivate curiosity, humility, resilience, and a tolerance for ambiguity. In turn, these traits empower them to be effective communicators, collaborators, leaders, and problem-solvers.

AACSB emphasizes cultural agility in its 2020 Business Standards, which encourage business schools to educate learners about global business trends and foster their sensitivity to cultural differences. AACSB-member schools are expected to prepare students for global careers through international experiences that are immersive, reflective, and thoughtfully designed.

Business schools have long turned to education abroad as a way to build cultural agility. But an international experience will only spark meaningful growth when students have opportunities to take three actions:

1. Stretch. Are students immersed in unfamiliar cultural situations that challenge their assumptions? Will these activities provide them with the local context they need to succeed?
2. Connect. Are they forming meaningful relationships across cultures, asking insightful questions, and engaging in dialogue that promotes social learning?
3. Persist and reflect. Are students encouraged to learn from setbacks, seek feedback, and reflect on how those experiences contribute to their development?

When schools design experiences that meet those goals, education abroad becomes more than a source of great Instagram posts. It becomes the catalyst for the development of enduring competencies that will accelerate learners’ business careers.

Let’s take a closer look at how each of these dimensions contributes to real growth.

Stretch: Be Immersed in the Culture

Business students often arrive in a host country with a basic understanding of cross-cultural work values. But in more immersive programs, they quickly encounter nuanced cultural differences that challenge the textbook frameworks. Students may come in expecting a certain communication style, time orientation, or level of formality, only to discover that the real challenge lies elsewhere: understanding how trust is built, how leadership is interpreted, or how professional relationships are formed and sustained.

This mismatch can be disorienting; it’s also where the learning happens. Students are forced to confront the limits of their knowledge and the assumptions they often didn’t even know they held. Now in a stretch zone, students quickly realize that they cannot predict cultural styles; they must learn how people actually behave.

In immersive international programs, students quickly encounter nuanced cultural differences that challenge the textbook frameworks.

Immersion is key. When students live, study, and work with citizens of another country, they begin to absorb daily life patterns, implicit communication norms, and cultural priorities. They notice, for example, how hierarchy plays out in conversations at the dinner table, how decisions are made collectively or individually, or how the pace of life reflects broader attitudes toward time and productivity. These everyday moments challenge assumptions, deepen perspective-taking, and promote humility.

Take, for instance, a business student who assumed that speed and efficiency were universal markers of professionalism. While living with a family in southern Italy, she observed a very different rhythm. Business meetings began with unhurried personal conversations, lunch breaks were sacrosanct, and follow-up decisions often came later than she had expected. Initially frustrated, she began to recognize that relationship-building was not a detour from business in Italy, but the core of it. Such a shift in mindset, prompted not by a textbook but by lived experience, is the essence of developing cultural agility.

One school that offers students immersive experiences is the College of Business at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton. Every summer, the school provides internships in Spain for approximately 30 business students, who work with local companies that run international operations.

“Students are thoroughly prepared before departure through pre-internship training focused on cross-cultural competence, communication, and workplace engagement,” says Joseph Patton, an FAU professor who developed and leads the Spanish internship program.

But what makes the FAU experience stand out is the depth of cultural immersion. Students live and interact with Spanish families, becoming fully integrated into the local community. By the end of the summer, “students are transformed both professionally and personally,” says Len J. Treviño, professor and director of international business programs at FAU. “They return to campus with a deep understanding of cross-cultural dynamics and how to thrive in foreign countries.”

Adds FAU student Adrian Monceau, “Studying abroad helped me define what it means to be a professional in the business world and opened my perspective to a whole new culture. For those thinking about studying abroad, my advice is to get outside your comfort zone and be comfortable with the uncomfortable.”

The type of immersive experience offered by FAU moves students beyond theoretical understanding to a more agile approach to global business. And it aligns with the Standards of Good Practice for Education Abroad maintained by The Forum on Education Abroad, a nonprofit association that provides training and resources to education abroad professionals. These standards emphasize the importance of ensuring that students engage deeply with local professionals and communities rather than relying on textbook knowledge or superficial experiences.

Connect: Work With Diverse Teams

Perhaps the most impactful and overlooked feature of education abroad is the opportunity to engage in teamwork in real business contexts. When students interact with colleagues who have different cultural perspectives, they must adjust their communication, leadership, and teamwork strategies.

At Texas Christian University (TCU) in Fort Worth, graduate students at the Neeley School of Business participate in a short-term faculty-led study abroad program. Before the trip, students assess their cultural agility; based on the results, they select attributes they would like to develop during the program.

Perhaps the most impactful and overlooked feature of education abroad is the opportunity to engage in teamwork in real business contexts.

The program includes a challenge during which students act as consultants for a business located in the country they are visiting. They meet with clients virtually on Zoom before their trips begin; once they’re in country, they start developing solutions for complex global challenges.

TCU professor Laura Meade has taken MBA students to Chile and Vietnam. “I see the students grow as individuals in a way that is transferrable to the workplace,” she says. “They learn how they can work better with people who are different, whether that is the client or their team members, which helps prepare them for future working relationships.”

One student, accustomed to fast-paced decision-making and direct communication, initially took charge of his group’s project. However, when working with peers from Asian and Latin American backgrounds, he found that his assertiveness was creating discomfort rather than driving progress. His teammates preferred a more collective approach to leadership and decision-making, one that emphasized relationship-building and consensus rather than rapid execution.

Through faculty coaching and peer feedback sessions, the student learned to adjust his leadership style, balancing decisiveness with active listening and collaboration. While still keeping the project on track, he stopped imposing his approach and instead began facilitating discussions that ensured all voices were heard.

TCU’s emphasis on teamwork aligns with Guidelines for Internships Abroad maintained by the Forum for Education Abroad. Those guidelines highlight the necessity of providing structured peer-level engagements that help students develop a deeper understanding of global teamwork rather than relying on surface-level interactions.

Persist and Reflect: Rethink Assumptions

While students must step into the stretch zone and engage with others if they want to develop cultural agility, they won’t experience true growth until they recognize where their understanding falls short and push themselves to close those gaps. That growth is often fueled by trial, error, feedback, and honest reflection.

Many students embark on international experiences assuming the professional skills they’ve honed at home—for instance, how to communicate, collaborate, or share knowledge—will seamlessly translate abroad. But cultural differences often hide beneath familiar external cues such as shared languages, similar office layouts, and common dress codes. One of the most powerful moments in a well-designed international program comes when students realize that business doesn’t operate the same way everywhere and that their instincts might not always serve them.

At Northeastern University in Boston, the Global Co-op program places students in extended professional roles in other countries. Students must apply what they know while working in unfamiliar environments and adapting to new cultural expectations. Missteps are inevitable, of course, but so is the growth that comes from working through them with intention.

Professor Ruth Aguilera, the director of Northeastern University’s Bachelor of Science in International Business (BSIB), noted that “real transformation happens when students navigate unfamiliar professional environments, make mistakes, adapt, and take time to reflect. It’s that combination of challenge and introspection that builds lasting cultural agility.”

Without opportunities to reflect, students may struggle to see how their international experiences connect to real career skills or how to apply what they’ve learned once they’re home.

Helena D’Alessandro, a BSIB student who did her co-op in Greece, encountered this challenge firsthand. Accustomed to the American high-intensity work culture, she initially viewed her new work environment as frustratingly unstructured. Opportunities seemed ambiguous, team meetings were conversational rather than agenda-driven, and decision-making processes were lengthy. But what seemed like inefficiency at first was, in fact, a business culture built on relationship-based trust and long-term collaboration rather than immediate results.

Through reflection and persistence, D’Alessandro reassessed her assumption that a fast pace is inherently more effective than a slower one. She learned she could create her own opportunities in a system where patience, relationship-building, and adaptability were key success factors.

“My experience in Greece taught me to take a step back from a highly task-based and transactional approach to work,” she says. Drawing on lessons she had learned in a BSIB course called Understanding and Managing Cultural Differences, she put more effort into perspective-taking and relationship-building. “By doing so, not only was I informing my learning, but I could also tailor my work to best serve those around me and consequently have a more productive and fruitful experience.”

The importance of reflection is also emphasized in the Standards of Good Practice for Education Abroad, which call for students to develop transferable skills while they’re undertaking international studies. The standards stress that students shouldn’t just encounter cultural differences superficially and move on, but take time to make sense of these differences in ways that support their professional development.

This requires students to question and reframe their assumptions as they take on global roles. Without opportunities to reflect, students may struggle to see how their international experiences connect to real career skills or how to apply what they’ve learned once they’re home.

Assess: Measure What’s Working

To turn education abroad into long-term professional growth, business schools must go beyond the travel itinerary and provide students with opportunities to stretch, connect, and reflect. Once students return to campus, schools also must evaluate how much students learned during their travels.

That’s why more universities are investing in tools to foster and track development of students’ cultural agility. For instance, TCU and Northeastern utilize myGiide, a digital platform that enables students to assess their cultural agility development before, during, and after their time abroad. When students return from their travels, they use the tool to reflect intentionally, spot areas for growth, and connect their learning to career readiness. As students monitor how they are strengthening competencies such as curiosity, perspective-taking, and humility, they develop a clearer picture of their progress and gauge how prepared they are for global work.

Faculty and administrators also can draw on structured assessments to learn what’s working and what’s not. This enables them to create study abroad programs that deliver measurable learning and prepare students to navigate today’s interconnected world.