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To provide internal auditors with a summary of the communications skills needed for a successful professional career in internal auditing.

A range of recently published (2000‐2004) publications, which aim to show the importance of communication skills to internal auditors, is reviewed to show internal auditors the importance of highly‐developed communication skills in almost every aspect of their activities.

Internal auditors need to possess excellent communication skills in order to succeed and advance in the changing, complex international global marketplace. Auditors utilize communication skills in almost every situation they encounter. Auditors must create an image of adding value to the organization and not just being investigators. Auditors must possess strong listening and interpersonal skills. Auditors have to be careful in using certain voice reflections when working with different types of individuals at various levels within an organization. Auditors must be aware of how their mannerisms impact auditees.

This paper identifies the importance of communication skills for internal auditors in their daily activities as professional auditors. Internal auditors will be more cognizant of the need to continually improve their communication skills throughout their professional career after reading this paper.

Whilst English remains the language of global commerce, the role and outcomes of English language provision in English-medium higher education institutions in the Arab Gulf countries remains central to any discussion on graduate profile and the employability of graduates in the global marketplace. This paper describes the findings of research into English workplace communication skills amongst a sample of Bahrain employers and students at Bahrain Polytechnic. Using a mixed methods approach, data was gathered through telephone interviews, student workplace simulations and employer focus groups. Findings show that generic employability skills, channelled through English as a second or additional language, are highly valued by Bahrain’s employers. In particular, students need to market themselves as confident, knowledgeable individuals during the recruitment process and after recruitment, continuing to operate successfully in the sociolinguistic culture of their company. Consequently, it is concluded that English language training in higher education programmes needs to move from purely linguistic and degree-related content areas to a broader remit of English for communication purposes that covers both specialised discourse fields and broader generic employability skills and competencies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the industry's expectations on the key employability skills of fresh graduates in the communication and media industry. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has raised the question of whether the university should produce work-ready graduates with employability skills. Driven by the theory of human capital, society expects higher education to produce graduates with skills that are useful in their workplace.

The data were gathered primarily through a quantitative survey, which was later extended to include qualitative interviews. Quantitatively, questionnaires were completed by 313 employers from the middle and top-level management from the communication and media industry. This study also expands on qualitative data through in-depth interviews with nine respondents who were among key decision-makers of recruiting graduates to garner their insights on required employability skills.

The findings revealed the following employability skills required by the industry in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: communication, ICT or digital, leadership, interpersonal, and personal qualities skills.

These findings are beneficial to education providers as well as media and communication industries in preparing students and developing their skills to adapt to the changes in the workplace.

The authors provide an empirical understanding of industry expectations towards employability skills in the Fourth Industrial Revolution of the communication and media industry within the Malaysian context.

Drawing on the political theory of leadership and the input‐process‐output model the purpose of this paper is to examine the link between leader political skill and team performance by focusing on the mediating role of team communication and the moderating role of team task interdependence.

The authors collected three waves of data from 80 teams across four business units and employed hierarchical regression modeling and the moderated path analysis approach suggested by Edwards and Lambert to test the moderated mediation model.

Leader political skill was found to positively influence team performance via promoting the quality of team communication. Moreover, team task interdependence moderates the relationship between leader political skill and team communication, such that the relationship is stronger when team task interdependence is high rather than low.

First, the paper adopts the measuring scales developed in the western organizational context to investigate the relations and phenomena existing in the Chinese organizational context. Future research should adopt the indigenous measuring scales to investigate the relations and phenomena existing in the Chinese organizational context. Second, both political skill and team performance were reported by the team leader, which might lead to common source bias. Future research should allow team members to rate leaders' political skill and the team leaders' supervisors to provide evaluation of team performance.

Owing to its importance to team performance, political skill is one of the critical skills that leaders should make efforts to develop. When companies recruit leaders for work teams, they should put more attention on the political skills of the candidates. Moreover, companies should cultivate a cooperative team climate to facilitate team communication.

Although Ahearn et al. suggested that leader political skill has positive effect on team performance, they did not empirically examine the specific process and mechanism through which the positive effect occurs. This study argues team communication is a critical mechanism that bridges leader political skill and team operations and outcomes as well. The study adopts longitudinal research design and collects multi‐source data to test the authors' model. The study also complements past research by investigating both the mediating and moderating mechanisms in the leader political‐team performance linkage.

The principle focus of the European Communication Professional Skills and Innovation (ECOPSI) Research project reported in this paper is to develop understanding of the competences held by senior communication practitioners and the contributing knowledge, skills and personal attributes that are relevant to their role. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper is based on 24 months of desk and empirical work by the research team in three core phases: the benchmarking report based on literature reviews in each country region; quantitative data collection from communication practitioners in 42 countries across Europe; qualitative data from 53 interviews across four senior practitioner roles in the six regions of the study’s focus.

The findings highlight the competencies needed by senior practitioners through the creation of the Communication Role Matrix with critical evaluation of the current contemporary issues faced by the sector.

The authors acknowledge a limitation of the study regarding the selection of the four studied professional roles. ECOPSI has proven a common understanding of theses four studied roles in Europe, but further research on the competencies of diverse roles performed in the profession would need to be explored for a more comprehensive appreciation of the full spectrum of public relations and strategic communication practice.

The paper draws together findings from across Europe and presents a practical interpretation of the project in the form of an online self-diagnostic tool based on an online portal for practitioners to self-complete.

The programme improves the professionalism of practitioners across Europe and their ability to work across borders in a European and wider international community of communication practitioners.

This study benchmarks the educational and practice landscape in six key regions of Europe to demonstrate that the elements focusing on skills, knowledge and personal attributes of European communication professionals can be synthesised using competences as the foundational element. The originality is also reflected in the self-diagnostic tool for the project based on an online portal.

The purpose of this paper is to inform the development of mixed initiative systems for distributed digital communication of manual skills. In particular, manual skills that are essential in project production paradigms such as engineer‐to‐order.

Findings from survey research, which included literature review and interviews with practitioners, are reported. Literature review investigated media, strategies, and computation relevant to distributed digital communication of manual skills. Interviews investigated attitudes among industry practitioners towards distributed digital communication of manual skills.

Communication media, instructional strategies, and computational semantics techniques are available which can be integrated to address the limitations of human communication of manual skills.

Only ten organizations were involved in interviews investigating attitudes towards distributed digital communication of manual skills.

Manual skills will continue to be important to project businesses involved in the production, refurbishment, and/or maintenance of large engineer‐to‐order products such as public buildings and process plants. The limitations of human communication can be addressed by using a variety media, such as augmented reality headsets, to enable new instructional strategies, such as just‐in‐time training. Further, combinations of media and strategies can be integrated with computational semantics in the development of mixed initiative systems which provide feedback as well as initial instruction.

The originality of the research reported in this paper is that it addresses a full range of enablers for distributed communication of manual skills. Further, an overview of computational semantics is presented which does not rely on prior specialist knowledge. The value of this paper is that it introduces a framework for enabling distributed communication of manual skills. In addition, a preliminary ontology for distributed communication of manual skills is introduced, together with recommendations for implementation.

This paper aims to examine the business communication skills that accounting students see as having the highest importance for career success. It also explores the current levels of development of these skills and analyzes them through a comparative study between three Tunisian business schools.

The authors used a questionnaire sent to180 students from three business schools to provide insights into the development of communication skills perceived important for a successful accounting career.

The results indicate that all students are conscious of the importance held by communication skills for career success in the accounting profession. However, they feel that their aptitudes are sometimes poorly developed, especially when it comes to proficiency in French (as a language of business in Tunisia) and written skills.

The paper’s findings offer important guidance concerning the communication skills that accounting students consider most needed by the Tunisian labor market. The findings of this study may be useful for curriculum development in local and international contexts.

This study is conducted in a developing country where the graduate unemployment rate is about 30 per cent. This high unemployment often affects service professions like accounting. Moreover, in Tunisia, accounting education focuses particularly on technical aspects. So far, no studies have been conducted to show whether students nowadays are aware of the increasing importance of generic skills in accounting practice. As a result, the conclusions of this study could provide Tunisian stakeholders with insights into ways of potentially improving accounting graduates’ employability.

This article is an updated version of Chapter 6, “Teaching Communication Skills in the United Kingdom”, which appeared in Communication Skills. Volume 1: An International Review, edited by Philip Hills and Margaret McLaren, Croom Helm, London, 1987. In 1979 a survey of courses, books and materials used in communication skills courses in universities, polytechnics and institutes of higher education listed 55 institutions providing such courses which “varied in purpose, length, style and content”. The main areas dealt with by these courses were in:

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, to investigate the interpersonal communication skills that human resource (HR) managers expect managers in supervisory positions possess. Second, to identify which of these skills HR managers expect managers use to engender subordinate commitment to the organisation. Third, the paper aims to investigate what interpersonal communication skills that enhance employee commitment to the organisation are most lacking in managers in supervisory positions.

The approach of the study is a series of in‐depth interviews with 32 senior HR managers in organisations with over 100 staff.

The paper finds that senior HR managers expected managers to be effective in interpersonal communication focusing mainly on the clarity and frequency of the messages, their ability to actively listen and the ability to lead in a collaborative way. The way messages were sent, especially their clarity, and a leadership style that engendered trust, was of the highest importance when HR managers wanted to enhance employee commitment to the organisation. However, these skills were also the ones found most lacking.

HR practitioners need to consider more explicitly what behaviours are important to promote organisational commitment.

This paper highlights that the interpersonal communication skills that enhance organisational commitment and are most valued by organisations are those that are most lacking in managers. This paper also provides insight for practitioners to the interpersonal communication skills areas that managers need to develop so that their interaction with staff may enhance commitment to the organisation.

Engineers graduating from premier institutions of India look for global opportunities that will provide a chance to work with the best and the most innovative minds in the world. Nevertheless, to compete in the global job market, they require added competence in English. However, it is seen that despite exemplary hard skills, lack of good communication skills has obstructed the growth of engineers. This study aims to find a viable tool to enhance engineering students' communication skills despite many limitations. The purpose of this study is to explore how presentations can be used to address problems of low levels of English ability in highly skilled, high-functioning engineering professions.

This paper discusses a study conducted in India's premier institution where around 240 first-semester engineering students were the sample. It uses partial ethnographic research to verify its hypothesis that presentations compel students to plan, prepare, practise and perfect their communication skills. It presents an ethnographic experiment conducted by the researchers and data collected using the qualitative research method of interviews.

The results of the paper indicate that making engineers plan, prepare and make presentations can explore their ability to communicate in English. It also concludes that presentation helps students explore all four language skills, that is, reading the information collected, listening to peers, writing or preparing their presentation and finally speaking in front of the audience.

This paper argues that presentation can be made a practice even in a large class of multi-level second language (L2) learners as it will generate interest in students and will develop many qualities such as team spirit, confidence and public speaking.

This study will help to address problems of low levels of English ability in highly skilled, high-functioning engineering professions.

Since engineering classes in Indian institutes often comprise 80–120 students, the English teachers face immense challenge of simultaneously improving communication skills of a large number of students who are multi-lingual, multi-level L2 learners. Therefore, this paper presents an effective and interesting way of involving all the students and using presentation to improve their communication skills.