Key Action 1 Erasmus+ proposals 
must be based on an internationalisation plan. This means that your institution needs a plan about how it will internationalise or Europeanise, before funding can be granted for specific projects. In my last post I mentioned that this was primarily as a way of improving quality in learning. So let’s take a closer look at why an educational institution might gain from having an internationalisation plan.
Globalisation is all around us
The main reason is that the evidence of globalisation is all around us and we do our learners a disservice if we do not reflect this in our teaching. At the recent Internationalising your institution conference in Copenhagen, the statistic of 1 in 7 jobs being trade-related was mentioned. And that ratio can only increase in the foreseeable future.
Perhaps you could try a little thought experiment right now by going through your nearest family members, friends and neighbours in your mind and working out which of them have global connections in their work. If that includes teachers then there is bound to be some students with a foreign background in their classroom.
Internationalisation at home is all about making the most of these glocal connections.
Internationalisation or Europeanisation?
The map showing the rapid movement of world economic focus eastwards featured in the previous post is a powerful illustration of why internationalisation might be a better focus even than Europeanisation. And the Erasmus+ programme reflects this need by making activities with non-EU countries even easier.
Best practices may not be local
Even in the best performing countries, there will always be room for improvement and the good ideas could just as easily come from outside the country rather than within it. I refer to countries because that is the way the Erasmus+ programme is built. So for example if you want staff to attend a course then funding only follows if the course is outside your institution’s country. And there is always a higher chance of connections and synergies when people from very different professional contexts meet up rather than working solely within your own ranks.
Marketable skills
No matter what reason you have for spending time abroad (apart from in a holiday situation), that experience will have you relying on your own inner resources and ingenuity and will develop skills of creativity, bravery and resourcefulness which are in high demand from employers. This goes both for staff and learners’ mobility. At the recent Copenhagen conference on internationalisation they described some research in which employers were presented with several different CVs in application for a typical job and invariably employers chose those CVs which showed evidence of what you might call entrepreneurial skills as evidenced by stays abroad.
In future posts I will describe some concrete examples of a couple of very different organisations that have implemented internationalisation in very different ways.