Mr. Horace L. S. Ho, former Chief HR Officer of global companies as well as visiting scholar of leading MBA programmes, presented a sharing session on “English Language Skills: Your Key to Global Thinking” on November 6th, teaching the first-year International Business Cohort Students the skills of using English.
In his session, Mr. Horace Ho introduced the concept of globalization and the importance of being able to think globally. China that has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of globalization promises more opportunities to those who are willing to take risk and who can leverage global thinking and strong English language skills in the One Belt One Road initiative.
Mr. Ho, though born in Hong Kong, has lived, studied and worked for five decades in the U.K., Canada and China and who has also operated in over 20 countries around the world, including the U.S., U.K. and Canada, shared with the International Business Cohort of City University of Macau his recipe for international success. Not only did he identify strong English skills as the key ingredient, he also outlined some key steps to achieve strong English skills that are practical and effective, because classroom English is of limited use in the real world. He particularly drew attention to the use of metaphors and idioms, something that is generally inadequately covered in the classroom, which is in fact the language primarily utilized by native English speakers in social as well as business environments. He completed his session with a fun quiz to pique the interest of the students in global thinking.