International Skills

International Skills

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Being international requires more than just wanderlust. Whether you’re encountering members of a foreign culture on a sightseeing trek, or applying for a professional position abroad, it’s your international skills that will set you apart from the crowd. Use these articles and resources to learn what skills internationally-focused recruiters are looking for, and what it takes to succeed abroad in a multicultural team. Start building your International IQ now.

Resource Lists

Resource Lists

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Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. ”
Italo Calvino, writer
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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey. ”
Pat Conroy, writer
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Real adventure is defined best as a journey from which you may not come back alive, and certainly not as the same person. ”
Yvon Chouinard, rock climber
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We must travel in the direction of our fear. ”
John Berryman, poet
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All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.”
Samuel Johnson, poet, essayist
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All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it. ”
Samuel Johnson , poet, essayist
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Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
Matsuo Basho, poet
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The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it. ”
Rudyard Kipling, Author
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A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.”
Tim Cahill, travel writer
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One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. ”
Henry Miller, writer, painter
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Life for two weeks on the mountaintops would show up many things about life during the other fifty weeks down below. ”
Benton Mackaye, conservationist
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No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”
Alan Watts, writer, philosopher
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To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. ”
Freya Stark, explorer, travel writer
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Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
Kurt Vonnegut, writer
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Definition of Global Competence: "Having an open mind while actively seeking to understand cultural norms and expectations of others, and leveraging this gained knowledge to interact, communicate and work effectively in diverse environments."”
William D. Hunter, intercultural expert
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The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land. ”
Gilbert K. Chesterton, journalist, essayist
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We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.”
Jawaharlal Nehru, politician
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Nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes common ground, and a common bond, and we cease to be alone. ”
Wendell Berry , academic, critic
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.”
Susan Sontag, essayist, activist
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Not all those who wander are lost. ”
J.R.R. Tolkien, writer, professor
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Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
Mark Twain, writer
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One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.”
Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician, philosopher
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People don't take trips -- trips take people. ”
John Steinbeck, writer
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I am convinced that to live is to travel towards the world's end. ”
Ella Maillart, adventurer
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The journey, not the arrival, matters. ”
T.S. Eliot, poet
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Two roads diverged in a wood and I -- I took the one less traveled by.”
Robert Frost, poet
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Before the traveler sees the ocean, he feels a stirring in his blood. ”
Jorge Luis Borges, writer, poet
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A traveler without observation is a bird without wings. ”
Moslih Eddin Saadi, poet
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I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.”
Lillian Smith , writer, social critic
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For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles. ”
Barry Lopez, writer
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The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.”
Henry David Thoreau, writer, naturalist
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Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ”
Mark Twain, writer
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For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move. ”
Robert Louis Stevenson , writer, poet
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A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. ”
Lao Tzu, philosopher
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Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. ”
Miriam Beard, writer
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Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”
Jack Kerouac, writer, poet
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I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine. ”
Caskie Stinnett, writer, editor
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As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
Margaret Mead, cultural anthropologist
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You lose sight of things… and when you travel, everything balances out. ”
Daranna Gidel , writer
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It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves. ”
Sir Edmund Hillary, explorer
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If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home. ”
James Michener, writer
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Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter. ”
John Muir, writer, naturalist
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A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
John Steinbeck, writer
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Travel teaches toleration. ”
Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister
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I love to travel, but hate to arrive. ”
Albert Einstein, physicist
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When you are everywhere, you are nowhere. When you are somewhere, you are everywhere. ”
Rumi, poet
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The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in having new eyes. ”
Marcel Proust, writer
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People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home. ”
Dagobert D. Runes, philosopher, writer
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The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are. ”
Samuel Johnson, poet, essayist
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The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it -- basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them. ”
Charles Bukowski, writer, poet
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Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”
Seneca, philosopher
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When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.”
Clifton Fadiman, writer, radio & tv host
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Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. ”
Francis Bacon, writer
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To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”
Robert Louis Stevenson , writer, poet
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The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”
Rudyard Kipling, writer, poet
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We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. ”
Hilaire Belloc, writer, historian
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Is anything sadder than a train/That leaves when it's supposed to/That has only one voice/Only one route?”
Primo Levi, chemist, writer
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Too often, I would hear men boast only of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.”
Louis L'Amour, writer
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The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
St. Augustine, philosopher
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I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them. ”
Mark Twain, writer
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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. ”
Paul Theroux, travel writer
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Travel is glamourous only in retrospect.”
Paul Theroux, travel writer
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Don't tell me how educated you are; tell me how much you have traveled.”
Mohammed
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No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”
Lin Yutang, writer, inventor
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All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
Martin Buber, philosopher
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He who does not travel does not know the value of men. ”
Moorish proverb
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I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it. ”
Rosalia de Castro, poet
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To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
Aldous Huxley, writer
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If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.”
Mario Andretti, racing driver
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Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. ”
Henry David Thoreau, writer, naturalist
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The more I traveled, the more I realized that fear makes stranger of people who should be friends. ”
Shirley MacLaine, actress
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A wise traveler never despises his own country. ”
Carlo Goldoni, playwright
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The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. ”
Mark Jenkins, artist
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People who do not travel cannot have a global view, all they see is what's in front of them. Those people cannot accept new things because all they know is where they live. ”
Martin Yan, chef
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We travel to learn; and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own. ”
Maria Mitchell, astronomer
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There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only who is foreign.”
Robert Louis Stevenson , writer, poet
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There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it. ”
Charles Dudley Warner, writer
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The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them.”
Amelia E. Barr, writer
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Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”
Anatole France, writer
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Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. ”
Maya Angelou , writer, poet
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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
Douglas Adams, writer
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We start going downhill when we stop taking risks.”
Laird Hamilton, surfer
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Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”
Miriam Beard, writer
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The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.”
Gilbert K. Chesterton, journalist, essayist
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Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.”
Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister
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To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”
Bill Bryson, writer
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Half the fun of travel is the aesthetic of lostness.”
Ray Bradbury, writer
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I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. ”
Hilaire Belloc, writer, historian
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...I never write when I'm traveling, because travel is a situation where I can learn more by looking and listening than by working. ”
Thomas Perry, writer
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A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
Lao Tzu, philosopher
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It is not down on any map; true places never are. ”
Herman Melville, writer, poet
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When you're traveling, you are what you are. No yesterdays on the road.”
William Least Heat Moon, travel writer
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He who would travel happily must travel light.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, aviator, writer
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To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change. ”
Charles Horton Cooley, sociologist
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I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education. ”
David Rockefeller, philanthropist
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The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it. ”
Lord Chesterfield, statesman
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Few men during their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. ”
Admiral Richard E. Byrd, explorer
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A map is not the territory.”
Alfred Korzybski, philosopher, scientist
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...the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time. ”
Paul Fussell , historian
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Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson , essayist, poet
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Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure. ”
Aldous Huxley, writer