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Not long after I turned 30, I was sent to Washington DC as bureau chief of an Australian newspaper, under circumstances that seem unbelievable today.
The move was less impressive than it sounds. The bureau consisted of one employee – myself – and I was not the youngest foreign correspondent at the time.
But what was extraordinary by today’s standards was the splendor of my expat benefits. My rent was generously subsidized. I had top-shelf health insurance and reimbursements for a car, a telephone, newspapers and a host of other expenses. If I had had children, their school fees would have been paid too.
Other expats I knew had similar benefits, plus annual flights home for the whole family and money for things like accountants for the tax authorities. Some were given extra money to ensure that taxes collected abroad would not make them worse off than they would have been if they had stayed at home.
These lavish deals haven’t completely died out yet, but corporate relocation experts tell me they are on the decline in many companies, and not just in the media industry.
I suspect this is one reason why I keep hearing about a curious development in the workplace: less interest in the idea of working abroad.
This happened before the pandemic, when traditional packages for men and their non-working wives clashed with the rise of professional women who sometimes outranked their partners.
Expecting a dual-income couple to halve their earnings and destroy a career in exchange for a reduced expat package always seemed problematic, especially when they were also asked to endure the stifling atmosphere of Delhi or the crime rates of Tijuana.
But indifference towards international broadcasts appears to have increased since the pandemic, to the surprise of some specialists.
“It’s a bit of a shock,” said Caitlin Pyett, a consultant with the Crown World Mobility group who has worked in the moving industry for almost three decades.
She told me she first noticed the trend late last year, when clients in sectors ranging from renewable energy to medical technology said they were finding it harder to convince staff to take on foreign assignments.
This was unexpected at a time when the pandemic had created an explosion of traveling digital nomads, often in their twenties, who seemed to represent the future direction of work.
Pyett’s firm has begun investigating to understand what’s going on. In the meantime, she has theories, starting with the appeal of working from home that employees aged 40 and over discovered during the lockdown.
“They have developed the feeling that they can work just fine from their kitchen table, so why go back to the office, let alone get on a plane and go to the other side of the world?”
That feeling may help explain why international assignments have changed at companies like Ingka, the largest owner of Ikea stores. The group still posts staff with their families abroad for a number of business-critical functions. But a spokeswoman told me that the rise of remote working, plus ‘dual career challenges’, has led to a ‘significant increase’ in more flexible arrangements where staff commute or work on one-off projects in other countries.
There are other signs of a broader decline in the urge to work far away.
A recent global survey of more than 150,000 employees by the Boston Consulting Group found that the share willing to move abroad for work has fallen from 78 percent in 2018 to 63 percent in 2023.
This could be because the world is becoming less open, while work is becoming more global, says co-author Orsolya Kovács-Ondrejkovic.
By this she means that events like Brexit and geopolitical conflict have made it harder for people to physically move abroad, while the growth of flexible working has made it easier to stay put. “You can now work remotely in a better job without even having to move,” she says.
In other words, before the pandemic it was difficult to imagine that you would gain much experience or benefit from working in China while based in Europe, but now that thinking has changed.
All of these explanations make sense and I can understand why the well-filled expat assignment might fade away. But moving to a new country for work can still be a great thing, both for your life and for your career, as anyone lucky enough to do so will almost certainly find out.