"Human capital refers to the knowledge and skills which graduates acquire which are a foundation of their labour market outcomes. This form of capital bears the closest relation to skills approaches given that it is concerned with what and how graduates can make connections between their formal education and future employment outcomes."

Source: Tomlinson, M. (2017). Forms of graduate capital and their relationship to graduate employability. Education & Training, 59(4), 338–352.

1. Communication Skills

Definition: The CEFR defines mediation as activities where the user/learner acts as a social agent who creates bridges and helps to construct or convey meaning, sometimes within the same language, sometimes from one language to another. This encompasses:

• Active Listening: The ability to understand the main points when listening to speakers of different varieties of the language and identify the attitude or mood of the speaker(s). In multilingual contexts, this includes processing linguistic variations and cultural communication styles.
• Negotiation: Described in CEFR as the capacity to facilitate communication between people with different perspectives by helping to clarify positions and identify common ground. This involves mediating concepts and managing interpersonal relationships across linguistic boundaries.
  • Example Scenario:
    In a workplace project, a French-speaking colleague wants to follow a strict process, while an English-speaking colleague prefers flexibility. You help by restating each perspective in simpler terms, pointing out shared goals, and suggesting a middle solution that respects both styles.
• Team Communication (Focus: Group dynamics and collaboration): The CEFR emphasizes collaborative interaction where learners can encourage other people to contribute their ideas and feelings and react to what others say while managing multilingual group dynamics.
  • Example Scenario:
    During an Erasmus group project, some team members are quiet because English isn’t their strongest language. You invite them to share their views in their native tongue, then rephrase their contributions in English so the whole group can appreciate their ideas.
• Multilingual Communication (Focus: Strategic use of multiple languages): Defined as the ability to alternate between languages in their plurilingual repertoire to communicate specialised information and issues on a subject and make use of different languages during collaborative interaction. 

2. Adaptability Skills

Definition: The CEFR conceptualizes adaptability through pluricultural competence as the ability to experience otherness and diversity, to analyse that experience and to derive benefit from it. This includes:

• Discipline and Resilience: The capacity to persist through linguistic and cultural challenges, developing what the CEFR describes as tolerance of ambiguity and the ability to cope with the frustration of not understanding or not being understood.
• Flexibility in New Situations: The CEFR defines this as the ability to adapt their communication (verbal and non-verbal) to deal with Less Commonly Taught Languages, varieties, accents, and cultural contexts.
• Learning from Setbacks: Described as the capacity to learn from intercultural contact and willingness to question the values and presuppositions in cultural practices and products in one's own cultural environment.

3. Intercultural Competence

Definition: The CEFR defines intercultural / pluricultural competence as the ability to bring different cultures into relation with each other and includes the capacity to deal with 'otherness', to identify similarities and differences, to build on known and unknown cultural features. This includes:

• Social and Cultural Awareness: The ability to recognize when difficulties in communication or collaboration are due to cultural differences and adjust their approach accordingly. 
• Cultural Mediation: Defined as the capacity to act as cultural mediator between speakers of their L1 and L2, taking account of socio-cultural and sociolinguistic differences and explain cross-cultural misunderstandings and conflicts. 
• Building Cultural Bridges: The CEFR describes this as the ability to draw on their experience of different cultures to facilitate communication between members of different cultural groups and help to sustain communication between members of their own and other communities by expressing and inviting different perspectives.

Source: Council of Europe. (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment – Companion volume. Council of Europe Publishing. https://www.coe.int/lang-cefr