Launching the Power Skills Accelerator: Intercultural Cities Edition
Feb 05, 2026In today’s higher education landscape, institutions are under growing pressure to connect high-impact learning experiences to demonstrable career outcomes, without adding unnecessary workload.
The Power Skills Accelerator: Intercultural Cities Edition was designed to meet that challenge.
It empowers students participating in high-impact learning to turn urban exploration, at home or abroad, into measurable intercultural and career-ready skills, while allowing faculty to stay focused on their discipline-specific teaching.
Who is PSA Intercultural Cities Edition for?
Institutions offering courses that include a high-impact learning component both locally or internationally:
- Faculty-led study abroad
- Internship / Externships
- Service learning
- And more
If your institution is looking to maximize curriculum offering, the PSA Intercultural Edition is the perfect tool to link students’ discipline-specific training to their intercultural and power skills development with time-saving and low-lift quality learning and assessing resources.
How It Helps Institutions
The PSA Intercultural Cities Edition is a plug-in, low-lift solution designed for real-world experiences, so that faculty and staff don’t have to build intercultural or power-skills scaffolding from scratch:
- Seamlessly plugs into existing courses, programs and LMS’s;
- Aligns with global learning and institutional outcomes;
- Provides ready-to-use content, activities, and assessment tools;
- Allows faculty to focus on discipline-specific teaching, while the PSA supports intercultural and power skills development.
Most importantly, the Power Skills Accelerator supports measuring and demonstrating the career impact of high-impact programs through the Pre- and Post-Assessments results, available to view and export from the Partner Dashboard in real-time.
How It Helps Students (and Their Careers)
The PSA Intercultural Cities Edition is intercultural learning with clear career return on investment. Students don’t just “learn about” cities: they learn how to explain the value of their high-impact experience.
What students experience
- Real-world urban exploration, locally or abroad
- Exposure to complexity, difference, and lived diversity
- Structured opportunities to observe how belonging works in practice
What students practice
- Reflecting on experience using a recognized framework
- Comparing contexts critically rather than anecdotally
- Articulating in-demand power skills (communication, leadership, and teamwork)
- Connecting intercultural learning to professional growth
What students leave with
- A personalized Power Skills Profile showing measured growth over time
- A Reflection Project that connects experience to clear learning outcomes
- Concrete examples they can use in interviews and applications
What Is the PSA Intercultural Cities Edition?
The PSA Intercultural Cities Edition is an expansion of the Power Skills Accelerator and it brings together three powerful elements:
- Career-relevant power skills training and assessment
- The Intercultural Cities framework by the Council of Europe, globally recognized for understanding diversity and belonging in cities
- Experiential learning, grounded in real urban environments
Developed by the Council of Europe, the Intercultural Cities Framework helps assess how diversity is lived in cities all over the world. It focuses on the quality of interactions, spaces and policies of a city, whether difference is seen as a challenge or an advantage.
The PSA Intercultural Cities Edition leverages this framework and makes it student-centered, career-connected and destination-agnostic. Students do not need to travel abroad to benefit. They learn to critically analyze intercultural dynamics wherever they are, using power skills like communication, leadership and teamwork.
The learning journey combines the career-building elements of the Power Skills Accelerator, namely the Power Skills Assessment and the Cultural skills Power Skills Training, with intercultural training from the Intercultural Cities module.
Students have the chance to apply both their intercultural and power skills during their city explorations locally or abroad, reflect on their experience through a Reflection Project, and translate their experience into career-ready language with the Post-Assessment.
At the end of their program, students will receive a personal Power Skills Profile that demonstrates the intercultural and power skill growth for them.
From City Exploration To Career Value
The Power Skills Accelerator: Intercultural Cities Edition offers institutions a structured way to connect intercultural learning, career preparation, and student experience in one managed, low-lift module.
Whether students are crossing borders or crossing town, the outcome is the same: experience becomes learning when it is reflected on, and learning becomes career value when it is articulated.
Looking to integrate the PSA Intercultural Cities Edition into your programs, or upgrade your current CulturaGo partnership?
