An adult education expert who devises and runs social skills training courses, Dr Natasha Mosunova is well known in the Russian-speaking community thanks to her original observations about the British mindset and the detailed information she provides about the nuances of the local education system, which she shares generously on social media. Kommersant UK asked Dr Mosunova about the ins and outs of British higher education, the professions of the future, social death, and what, apart from knowledge of English, can help immigrants to succeed at work and in their careers. After these serious topics, as a bonus, we have an answer to the question of why it’s easier for women from Post Soviet countries to form relationships and generally integrate into the West than it is for men.
You are an apologist for university education, but today, from all sides, we hear that professional online courses are enough to become a highly recruitable specialist. Explain your position.
The value of university education is wider than simply the transmission and study of information. This difference has become more obvious during the lockdown when all education was reduced exclusively to online lectures. Ideally, university education should teach people to be able to deal with the unknown. On encountering a new problem, either at the office, in the world of science, or in business, people with university degrees are equipped with the knowledge to ask the right questions to the right people. They know what to prioritise, what to read up on and what to analyse. A classical university education provides these skills, unlike a narrowly specialised one which just fills the head with sets of rules, formulae and historical facts. The overall problem facing higher education establishments around the world, not only in Britain and Russia, is that either they are not able to keep abreast of the pace of change, or they just put their heads in the sand and ignore things. This may be due to a range of causes such as a lack of funding or staff shortages. As a result, many feel upon graduation that they lack any identifiable skills. Unfortunately, often they are right. At good universities, including those who have listened to us, the elements of study which help students to develop independent thought and critical thinking are given much greater emphasis. The success these universities have achieved in instilling these skills is precisely what has allowed them to survive over the decades.
Could you share your impressions of the differences between the kinds of thinking encouraged by the Post-Soviet education systems compared to the British system?
It’s difficult for me to answer that question equivocally as my own experience has been quite varied. In the Russian education system, a shift is going on towards the formation of independent thought. You can’t say that it all boils down exclusively to studying textbooks any more. Universities have introduced interesting new formats and different methods which allow students to take their first steps independently and teachers to test them more creatively. All the same, in my view the concept that ‘education is knowledge’ still dominates. Studying a subject begins with a cycle of lectures in which the teacher explains the ‘correct’ approach. Sometimes the teacher may refer to problematic issues. Then the seminars begin. In many subjects, the students largely just repeat what they were told in the lectures, possibly adding to it a little from their own reading. In exams, their task is to repeat the information they have been given as accurately as possible, so there is no motivation to treat the material critically as this is not rewarded. On occasion, in seminars, techniques and approaches are used which encourage the students to think for themselves, but overall, it’s all about memorising and repetition.
How are courses in Britain structured? The teacher gives students a couple of hundred pages to read, after which they answer some questions, and with this grounding, the students then go to their lectures. Only a small part of the set reading will be addressed in the lectures, and some parts of it may not be related to what was set at all. The teacher will probably show them a few patterns and answer questions as they come up. Seminars are independent work. There is a topic that students must explain, either individually or as a group.
These are fundamentally different approaches, and I can’t say which system is better and which is worse. This is because I see how Russian students get on at British universities. Of course, they need to adjust and understand the different teaching methods, but they complete their master’s degrees very successfully. The exam marking system is quite a different business. In Russia, a full answer without mistakes earns you a five. In Britain your mark is determined by seven criteria, so assessment of the accuracy of the information in the work is only a small part of that. The rest depends on how the student presents and analyses the information, whether or not they were sufficiently critical of it and whether they analysed it from all angles. So alongside the knowledge itself, a whole range of other aspects arise that the student must take into account.
Nowadays many humanities qualifications are Mickey Mouse degrees which are practically useless in real life. At the same time, there are an awful lot of people in the government with degrees in philosophy or languages, starting with Johnson…
If we consider an English education, we can see that the emphasis is predominantly on the development of soft skills rather than on knowledge as such. Many so-called Mickey Mouse degrees with no real-life application really are handed out in this country. Let’s take American Studies for instance. If we take the course’s title literally, what are you to do with it? This is one view. On the other hand, if we look at people’s career paths, we can see that it is entirely ordinary and typical in British society, the education system and the workplace for geography, history and philosophy graduates to work in finance or as auditors. Everyone cites Johnson, but there are many more examples. They acquire soft skills such as critical thinking and networking at university and hard skills through professional training. There is another important point related to the assessment of these skills. The hard ones are tangible and easy to demonstrate while the soft ones are more difficult to evaluate. For example, critical thinking is assessed in universities based on performance in presentations and reports. Sometimes students are compelled to develop these skills through extracurricular activity, by participating in committees, elections etc in order to learn how to talk to people, and out of necessity, they acquire the skills of public speaking and networking etc. This means that they are, to some degree, assessed by the university community as a whole rather than just by the teachers. If this is not explicitly stated by educators, it is nonetheless an integral part of the education system. This system, which encourages the acquisition of these skills, leads specialists in Ancient Greek to enter politics and become prime ministers and art students to end up in the financial sector.
Are the humanities for the ruling classes, who already have connections, whereas more technical subjects are for those who must make their own way?
In Britain, a technical professional education used to be acquired in polytechnics. At the end of the twentieth century, these colleges were transformed into universities, which has given rise to some confusion. The first point about learning a trade at an early age is that at 19, many people don’t know what they want to do, and this is entirely normal. Secondly, why are people complaining about university education? It is not just important for its professional and vocational aspects, but also in its own right. They are complaining because these days, people often change their employment and have two or three careers over their lives. In the old days, people went to teacher training college, worked all their lives as teachers and then happily retired. Nowadays, this is an exception. Modern life is different; you might start out as a journalist, become a politician and then a writer or maybe train as a teacher, then get into business and after that become a consultant. There will be more and more examples like this. When we think about the future for those who are currently studying, it’s clear that they need to be prepared to have several professions over the course of their lives. A set of soft skills such as analysis, critical thinking, being able to work with information, and interpersonal skills will ensure the smoothness of transitions between careers. For example, many operations performed by IT specialists can already be done by machines, which is why in the future, social and communication skills just as much as the ability to work with data are what will be needed to give people a competitive advantage over artificial intelligence. In a research piece from the USA, 71% of employers in the banking sector, finance and IT responded that they could not find candidates with normal social skills. This is why both now and in the future, soft skills will be essential for climbing the career ladder.
All the same, where should a humanities-leaning kid go to ensure they don’t end up jobless in a world where IT specialists are worth their weight in gold and the elite looks after itself?
My feelings about this problem are a little unorthodox. I have already said that it’s perfectly normal for young people not to know what to do after school, especially in the current conditions, when many of the top professions simply didn’t exist a few years ago. For example, game design is an extremely popular sector where the earnings are huge and your career path can take you right to Silicon Valley. It is unbelievably difficult to get onto these courses, the competition is enormous, (a portfolio of your previous project might be expected). For graduates, doors are opened around the world, although there is no guarantee that they will find the job of their dreams.
As for what skills children should be encouraged to develop, of course, the career advice may depend on which category the child fits into; either a humanitarian or a mathematician. However, if children can’t do the exercises they are set at school, this might be because of a problem with the teacher or the methodology rather than because of their mindset. I believe that it is entirely normal for a humanitarian to be unfazed by maths and be familiar with the discipline. For example, this year I taught maths in college. This experiment was the idea of a charity. They asked me to do it because they wanted a role model for teenage girls, rather than because of my expertise in this subject. I was a maths tutor for students from fourteen up. For me, as someone with a humanitarian bent, my knowledge of maths was enough to teach it in English. This is why I feel that the division of children into future technical specialists with hard skills and future humanities graduates with soft skills is dangerous, especially at an early age.
What should we prepare them for? For tech specialists, the threat of competition from AI I mentioned earlier is not a myth. In reality, Artificial Intelligence could replace people in many professions, including historically humanitarian ones. Lawyers all over the world are worrying about this right now, for example. Many tasks can be performed by machines, and only our social skills allow us to compete with them. Downloading, uploading, reformulating and composing information can be done by machine, but they can only gather strictly formalised data. In many areas, such as describing and categorising student behaviour, human assessment is needed. Communicating data to people is also a task strictly for humans. Everyone has heard examples of people who are not the most knowledgeable professionals who have wildly successful careers. It seems to me that there will be more of that.
This autumn you’re launching a new course entitled Assertiveness 3.0. This is a project aimed at developing social skills for Russian speakers. What is it about, who is it aimed at and what benefits will students gain from it?
Assertiveness is the ability to achieve your aims while developing networking and horizontal links in order to preserve and build relations with everyone you need to interact with. Over the course of our lives, it so happens that we tend to become passive and ready to make concessions, and we get used to this position. For example, Russian women always put the interests of their families, children, husbands or work etc before their own. They focus on keeping the family together so that everyone is OK. This is wonderful, but in terms of assertiveness, this is a passive position, as women like this are not concerned about their personal aims. They do not even consider them. The topic of aggression has been quite thoroughly examined, as you can see yourself in the media; aggressive discussions, ‘managerial fights’ [problem-solving contests with elements of role-playing devised by the Russian business trainer Vladimir Tarasov- translator’s note], such is the martial terminology. But assertiveness is different. It is not about beating everyone. It is a means of finding a solution where you win, and everyone else involved also gains something.
As for the target audience of the course, it is professionals in the middle of their careers, people who are already knowledgeable and highly skilled but feel that they are lacking something. As a rule, a large percentage of them are leading women from different fields; investments, finance, medicine, IT and HR. There are no professional limitations, as this course is about social skills. It can help them to learn how to negotiate in many spheres and to pursue their own interests. The main discovery for attendees is that large-scale gains can be won for a lower price than expected whilst preserving and even developing good relations with the people around them. However, I never know what aims people will come to my course with. Usually, they have one, for example, they may feel that it’s time for a raise, but they don’t know how to formulate the question and put it to the management. Or they may be negotiating a complex agreement, feel that the other side has stepped away from the original conditions and be wondering how to get a better price. I can usually help them to get this better price.
Is assertiveness an important quality for a businessperson?
Simply put, in the sphere of business, people on the course are given the motivation not to abandon the business. They learn to find alternative options to get what they want while smoothing and strengthening the horizontal links which, in the opinion of many experts and public figures, are a key to success. In business, it is now insufficient to consider the competition alone; horizontal links ensure trust, positive success stories and cooperation. They are what bind people together, drive progress, support us and provide various positive resources the value of which is hard to assess. When we are justifying a business plan in Britain, there must be a section on networking where we must demonstrate that we are already working with other businesses and that these links are a source of resilience. Assertiveness is when you don’t just appraise the competition, you find support as well.
One of the issues which frighten many on arrival in a new country is the fall in social status and the inability to find decent work. You believe that on coming to Britain, everyone can expect enforced downshifting and even so-called social death. Could you explain what this is and why this happens?
The stories are many and varied, both successful ones, where someone with a high-powered job in one country manages to move to a similarly prestigious position in a new country, and less successful ones, where new arrivals, from Russia and other countries, have to begin their careers anew more or less from scratch. The main reason for this is that even when people have the required knowledge base, they lack the social skills to communicate this to British employers and to their colleagues. This is because here in Britain, horizontal links work differently. Newly arrived immigrants cannot network effectively as they do not understand the cultural differences here. As a result, they have to restart their careers at a level lower.
The term Social Death was brought into general use by the sociologists Orlando Patterson and Zygmunt Bauman. This concept describes what happens to an immigrant who struggles to adjust to a new environment. It includes both a person’s fall in professional and social hierarchies and also a loss of important aspects of their life such as their familiar home, colleagues, relations, friends, hobbies and social activities. If some of these things fall away, sociologists begin to talk of social death. The majority of immigrants go through this. It may be temporary, but it is nevertheless a loss.
How can we be successful communicators in a foreign country?
It’s important to observe people around you without judging them. Turn off your usual assumptions. Then you can understand why the locals do certain things. Take note of the unfamiliar and see which of these things you could do too. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Let’s take the example of Portugal. In this country, it’s not done to hurry. To succeed you need to adapt to this speed. The Portuguese like to read the paper over a cup of coffee in the morning, and if you join them, you’re likely to acquire new acquaintances or at least understand why they do this. Start to pay attention to people’s intonations, accents, and nonverbal signals. This is the first thing people react to, whether or not they understand the language. If we say one thing, but our body language says something different to people, this may cause suspicion. Start to attempt to replicate the locals’ intonation, talking speed and facial expressions; adjust to the nonverbal signs. Then you’ll probably have a better grasp of why the locals do certain things in certain ways, and they’ll trust you more.
In brief, what do people need to know about communication with British employers?
To generalise, first of all, it’s important to listen. Often, rather than answering the interviewer’s questions directly, candidates give voice to their internal monologues during interviews. They address their own ideas and assumptions about how things should be and how they were in the past. Active listening is important, although some people find it quite painful. We conducted an experiment with students and saw that five minutes of active listening consumed a horrendous amount of energy. However, you have to remember that an idea can be distorted if you don’t listen carefully. The second point is some good news; it’s in the nature of British culture and the English language to ask a question which contains its own answer. For example, a typical employer’s question might be ‘what makes you think you can get this job?’. Your answer should be banal: ‘because my skill set is adequate for this job and what you are offering fits my plan’. I am now simplifying things, but it is very important not to fly off into the stratosphere by starting to talk about great things. You have to take the question literally and in your first sentence, whether written or spoken, give a precise and concise answer. Then, if you see that this is not enough, add some details. From my own experience, I’d say that our compatriots tend to immediately start to give a vast amount of information which is completely unrelated to the question. This can give rise to confusion and further awkward questions; ‘What is that for? What's that got to do with it? Are we talking about the same thing?’ etc. Although the way Brits communicate is held to be rather complicated and work on many levels, it’s almost always enough to just mirror your interviewer. The best way to talk to a potential employer is with reserved reasonableness.
In Russia self-advertising and self-PR are popular. Is it worth doing any chest-beating in an interview in Britain?
There’s a big cultural difference between Britain and Russia in this area. People with a Post Soviet background find it difficult to talk about themselves to British employers in the right terms and to provide the right facts. It’s one of those situations where we often go off into the big picture and cite collective achievements. They ask us ‘What have you done?’ or ‘What can you do?’. We answer ‘Our company works with… my department achieved something…’ usually these are simple questions to which it is sufficient to answer ‘I wrote to so and so, I called such and such, I consolidated information there, analysed X and avoided Y’. In Britain, many misunderstandings arise because of their traditional understatement (this is when people belittle their own significance and achievements and make a show of dismissing them). In this culture, in contrast to America, you must be careful with words such as ‘great’ ‘incredible’ and ‘amazing’. They use them, but for different aims and not to describe themselves. All the same, they can quickly give you all the facts. They’ll always give you the factology, but probably with deliberate understatement. Someone might say to you ‘Well, you know, I only have a degree from St Andrews University (as this is in fact a prestigious university, we understand that this person is a member of the elite), or ‘I have a tiny little flat in Kensington (one of the most expensive areas of London). In Russia it’s not like that, we can’t just tell people the bare facts: ‘I’ve done this, I live there, I went to such and such university’. We go into the details, into comparisons and levels of education. I often see this in applications: ‘I went to this university and it’s either the largest in my region or the most prestigious in my sphere’. There’s nothing terrible about that. But it’s better to learn to just give the bare facts and only when necessary.
Why is a good knowledge of the language not enough to begin to integrate into local society? And why is it difficult for people who come to Britain for the long term to feel at home, even if they have brilliant English?
If by brilliant English, you mean just A-level 9.0 then this really isn’t enough. Excellent knowledge definitely helps people to integrate, but more than simply knowing the language well, what is needed is awareness of the socio-cultural aspects that surround it, such as the differences between supper, dinner and tea. You need to know what topics Brits talk about and which are off-limits, why, in some situations, they use certain adjectives, while they use others in different situations. You should understand how they react to different accents and be aware that these accents can be trigger signals (a northern accent might bring on a fit of snobbism, although a foreigner may be forgiven for this transgression).
I have another related question. Why do women from the Former Soviet Union marry English husbands and create happy families while the charms of Eastern European men don’t seem to be so appreciated by British ladies? In your view, why is this?
As I see it, it’s not a question of whether or not they are appreciated. Our men find it quite difficult to form attachments and sustain relationships with British women because there are different cultural norms here which define the range of forms a relationship can take. I am of course over-simplifying, but Russian culture is quite conservative and has patriarchal tendencies. This is why, in our country, it is assumed that all relationships are formed with the same aim; to get married and start a family. In British society, the range of possible relationships is much wider. Here, the overall value of the relationship is understood differently. For example, people in Britain often say things like: ‘having a relationship isn’t a priority for me right now, I haven’t got the time, I’ll worry about that after I’ve finished this project’. The development of relationships follows a different pattern which determines when people meet when they go on their first date, how many of these dates they go on when they can hold hands or kiss, what this leads to etc. I suppose that it is difficult for Russian men, who are so much in demand back home, to appreciate this range of possibilities, make a choice and adapt to it. We have talked about assertiveness and passivity…as I see things, the average woman from the Former Soviet Union must take into account very many factors in order to survive and thrive; things such as public opinion and the demands of her husband and children. Her habit of evaluating what’s happening around her and adjusting her life accordingly means she is well-prepared to form relationships in a foreign country.
Is the ability to adjust yourself to others’ habits and to copy people in their new environment the secret to successful adaptation?
I would say so. Although this approach has its own pitfalls. This behaviour is a sign of a lack of assertiveness. For true adaptation, it’s important to hold onto your values and sooner or later address them. To simply survive, mimicry is enough. But if your life has some meaning that you want to preserve, mimicry is not enough; you need to be assertive. You asked about the target audience for my course, well, 80% of my students are women. They have already recognised the need to communicate their demands in the right way. I see far fewer male immigrants. I understand that we have a male-dominated world and a patriarchal culture. Men don’t yet have the feeling that there is a problem that they need to deal with or something they have to adjust to.
