Engineering Students Mobility: Intercultural Barriers to Achieving Intercultural Competences

Intercultural competences play an increasingly important role in engineering. Mobility of university students enables obtaining benefits from different cultural and lingual environments, gaining cross-cultural experiences, as well as learning languages, habits and customs of host countries. However, besides the evident advantages, international exchange is surrounded by some concomitant problems. This research aims to enhance intercultural competences of engineering student by overcoming the main intercultural barriers recognised during the case study devoted to the international exchange. For this end, some educational modules are revised, the reasons of inactivity of certain groups of students are found out, and several steps are offered to improve mobility outcomes. The paper may help students guide their own education and suggests useful references for university staff in improving their current curricula.