Cultural Differences between Learners and its Impact on the Development of Blended Learnings: an Analysis of Shift Supervisors in Austria, China, The Czech Republic, Great Britain, Indonesia and The United States

The education and training of employees is an elementary component of many companies. To ensure an efficient further education of employees, trainings should be optimally adapted to the respective target group. Here, among other things, the culture of the learner plays a major role. This paper is based on findings identified in an internationally active Austrian company. Six of the largest sites of the company, which will be included in the survey, are based in Austria, China, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Indonesia and the United States. The goal of this survey is to reveal the biggest differences regarding learning preferences and learning strategies of the company’s shift supervisors in relation to their cultural backgrounds. The focus will be on behavioral changing blended learnings. Based on the findings, recommendations for action should be made to allow for adaptations of future blended learnings and to better meet the culturally diverse needs of the company’s shift supervisors. To reach these goals, a qualitative research with sixteen semi-structured expert interviews will be carried out. The informants will be employees of the six different production sites of the company and external trainers that have already worked with the company. All of them are experienced in the development and/or implementation of trainings for one or more of the discussed cultures. Up to the present time, fourteen interviews have been carried out and transcribed. In a first step, to offer preliminary findings for this paper, four interviews with the employees from the Czech Republic and the United States have been analyzed. Based on these interviews it can be noted that there are a lot of similarities in learning behavior of shift supervisors in the Czech Republic and the US. The discovered differences deal with the personal relationship between trainer and learner, the combination of participants in face-to-face trainings and the perceived self-efficacy of learners.