Getting terms in writing and planning for your return are the keys to offshore success.
Mitzi Pearce was a young IT manager at Bank of America in San Francisco when the opportunity to live and work abroad first presented itself. Now, 23 years later and with more than a decade of international management experience under her belt, Pearce, 53, is back at square one.
Mitzi Pearce was a young IT manager at Bank of America in San Francisco when the opportunity to live and work abroad first presented itself. She was single, didn’t own a house or car and was well qualified for a high-level assignment in Hong Kong managing the bank’s data centers throughout Asia.
Now, 23 years later and with more than a decade of international management experience under her belt, Pearce, 53, is back at square one.
Keys to evaluating assignments
“It’s embarrassing. I am a computer operator right now, which is where I started [and] is very frustrating to me,” she says about her job at Arizona Public Service, an electric utility based in Phoenix. “I’ve had more staff under me than is working in our current data center. That’s how desperate I was for work,” she recalls about her return to the United States after working nearly 15 years in Hong Kong and London for several major international banks.
Pearce is happy with her current job and cherishes her experiences abroad, but she cautions other IT professionals not to make the mistakes she made, which are all too common among managers lured by the glamour of an overseas post. Veteran expatriates, relocation specialists and IT recruiters agree that a careful, upfront analysis of the professional and personal aspects of an international assignment is critical to long-term success.
“Really, what matters is planning to come back,” says Peter Woolford, a recruiter with Boston staffing firm Kforce. “You’re sent off on this assignment, and when the assignment ends, whether it’s a year or two years down the road, there’s really no plan to reintegrate you into the company. And you’re not around to advocate for yourself.”
In fact, Bank of America did have a plan to repatriate Pearce and other team members who completed the three-year assignment to consolidate its Asian wholesale banking activities within its Hong Kong data center. In 1987, however, in the wake of a South American loan crisis and other types of turbulence in global financial markets, the bank didn’t have the jobs available to fulfill the plan.
“They actually sent us back to interview for positions knowing that all these managers had been told there was a hiring freeze,” Pearce recalls. Having been tipped off to the situation back home, Pearce secured a job as a data-center manager with a local bank that later was acquired by London-based Standard Chartered Bank, then returned to the United States to claim her repatriation allowance from Bank of America before heading back to Hong Kong for another 10 years.
IT professionals considering an overseas job or assignment should analyze all the personal, professional and financial aspects of the position. Above all, they should get the terms of the assignment, contingencies and future career options in writing from their employer.
“A clear and concise contract or relocation policy from your employer, stating all the services they will supply for you, is of the utmost importance,” says Sandy Winter, a certified relocation professional who has been handling international relocations for 13 years at Mobility Services International in Newburyport, Mass.
Many large multinational companies offer predecision and predeparture services for expatriate employees, such as financial analysis, language training, counseling to address family considerations and cross-cultural information, she says. Key financial considerations include cost-of-living adjustments, including housing assistance in the host country and selling or maintaining the employee’s present home; tax consulting to help the employee determine and mitigate the impact of foreign and U.S. taxes; and the impact if an employee’s spouse isn’t able to work abroad.
Failure to get such terms in writing drove the lesson home again for Pearce in 1997, when Standard Chartered Bank, on its third try, convinced her to move from Hong Kong to a position in London.
“They begged me to go. I agreed to go. I assumed I was going on full, expat terms,” Pearce says – only to find that her manager had recruited her to fill a local job with only the pay and benefits given to locals. Having already given up her apartment in Hong Kong and moved all her belongings to London, she had little bargaining power.
“It was devastating to find yourself stranded in a country, thinking that you were going to get one set of benefits that had been offered to all of us as a group before, and then get over there and go, ‘Oh, that’s not the package.'”
Finding a good job in a foreign country or even back home after an extended assignment overseas can be challenging, as international experience isn’t always as marketable as expatriates assume. Plus, connecting potential employers with references who are 15 time zones away can be tough, Pearce says.
“I think it’s an easy pitfall to fall into,” Woolford says. “The best thing you can do is pay attention, right from the beginning, to what you’re going to come back to and what the potential options are, and work on arranging those the entire time you’re offshore,” he says.
“I would advise anyone going on such an assignment to do some serious research, ask lots of questions and get all promises in writing,” Pearce says. “For me, it really was a grand adventure, despite any difficulties with my employment status, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for all the world. It was definitely not a good career choice in my case, and I could have protected my interests a lot better had I known more about what I was getting into.”
Garretson is a freelance writer in Gaithersburg, Md. He can be reached at rgarretson@gmail.com.
