Cultural Competence

Cultural competence is the ability to effectively interact and form meaningful relationships with individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds, encompassing their beliefs, customs, and behaviors. It involves a lifelong process of enhancing self-awareness, social skills, and behaviors related to diversity, and developing the capability to advocate for others. Unlike mere tolerance, which implies overlooking differences, cultural competence requires recognizing and respecting diversity in all contexts through words and actions.

Intercultural Communication and Competence
Cultural Competence has been defined as a set of skills and attitudes that allow individuals to effectively and appropriately communicate with people who are different from themselves. A culturally competent organization effectively and appropriately serves a diverse clientele and meets the varied needs of its diverse staff. This program will explore how individuals and organizations can become more culturally competent. Self and organizational assessment models will be presented and the various components of each stage of competence will be discussed. Find out when the next course is available for Intercultural Communication and Competence (UC Learning Center Instructor Led, offered a few times per year).

Bridging Differences in Cross-cultural Communication
Communicating successfully with people from our own culture, in our own language is challenging enough. When we interact with people from other cultures, the barriers to effective communication are even more pronounced. In this course, you will learn about two principal dimensions of culture that underlie culturally different ways of communicating and learn vocabulary that will allow you to explain differences in communication styles. You will also explore barriers to communicating effectively across cultures and identify ways to overcome them. You can complete this online eCourse on this page - Bridging Differences in Cross-cultural Communication (UC Learning Center, 26 min).

Understanding Cultural Competence
In this course, instructor Mary-Frances Winters explains why cultural competence is key to the success of any diversity-related initiative, as well as how to assess and grow your own cultural competence. She shares scenarios and techniques that can help you grasp how your worldview impacts your behavior, as well as how to more effectively engage and adapt across cultural differences. Start learning here - Understanding Cultural Competence (Linkedin Learning). To request your LinkedIn Learning Account, contact ANR IT at help@ucanr.edu.