Why Expats Get Trapped Away from Home
You’re a mid-level executive, working for a global company, asked to broaden your experience by working in an emerging market for a “couple of years”. A decade later, you are still working away from home, lacking the experience to acquire positions back home.
You just fell victim to the Exiled Expat Syndrome.
Most developed country HR functions excel at deploying and managing expatriates on an international assignment, but many are poorly skilled at repatriating the executive into a meaningful role.
Global companies often tell their in-country employees to “think global, act local”, but the converse is a challenge. Companies have a difficult time synthesizing the returning expat’s enhanced skillset, and using it to maximum advantage. Very often companies require their returning expats to find their own position back home, or face severance.
But let’s go back to the beginning, and review how you and your family could get trapped in an emerging market country…
Soon after arrival, your family will start to acclimatize and take on an adventurer type mindset that opens your family to new possibilities. Here’s what you will discover:
The job: Expats often find themselves with a materially larger job than they had back home. You probably will have more subordinates to manage, greater range of responsibilities, and a higher title within the local organization. You may feel like you have gone from the ranks of a crowded middle management career level, into senior management level responsibility. This can often be a major ego boost.
Compensation and benefits: Perhaps you and your spouse have been living middle to upper-middle class lifestyles, both working, and slowly getting ahead. This will all change when you fully appreciate the reality of your new lifestyle. There is nothing like seeing the first salary deposit often being nearly double your reference salary back home. This is often due to salary additions for hardship, currency differentials, cost of living adjustments, and general assignment differential incentives.
Your house or apartment will be larger and more luxurious than the home you left, and is fully paid for by the company, including utilities. In addition, a full time maid/cook is often included as well. You will get a car and driver, due to risks associated with members of your family self-driving.
Socialization: Your children will attend private international schools, which meet the highest standards, fully funded by the company. Small class sizes and a multitude of after school activities will encourage rapid bonding. Your spouse almost certainly will be immediately invited into the local international spouses club, which sponsors a wide range of activities, including charity work, group tourism, and general friendship development.
The Syndrome Emerges
Companies often offer extensions, because it is less expensive and disruptive to keep a well-performing expat in their assigned position for a longer term. The alternative is a costly repatriation process, and the subsequent new expatriation process for the replacing individual.
You’ll be living high and happy, so it will be extremely tempting to sign up for a few more years. But after an extension of an additional few years, your current employer will require you to come home; after a period of five years in a country, expat benefits are taken away as the expat is considered “localized”.
Over the course of the four to five years working in the assigned country, you will have built in-country “networks of trust” while perhaps allowing home country relationships to go cold. You may be tempted by an offer from another multinational company to extend your expat lifestyle and all its associated benefits. Your alternative may be to take up a marginal position back home, probably acquired through open job postings.
It will become difficult or impossible for you to go home.
The only certain cure: avoid the Syndrome
If you ever want to go home again, you must take vital steps before you leave your home country:
Negotiate a guaranteed repatriation job upon completion of your initial assignment term.
Agree as a family that no matter how attractive the expat lifestyle, you are returning after a pre-set amount of time.
Keep your at-home networks strong, and never forget that your career depends on these contacts not forgetting you.