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Sometimes, your career can go global quite by accident. And how you deal with it can make a huge difference in the outcome.

About two years ago, I was on a ski vacation with my family when my cell phone rang on the chair lift. It was my boss, telling me that he really needed me to relocate to the United Kingdom for a month. Two weeks later I was sipping a single malt Scotch in my Virgin Atlantic Upper Class seat/bed/pod thing somewhere over Newfoundland.

Turns out I had been selected to participate in the secondment of a handful of US personnel to my media company’s UK headquarters. The goal was to spread some of the Internet best practices developed in the US to the UK online operations.

It was a great idea, but the reality of situation was that we had to figure out how to make ourselves useful pretty much on our own. This was a new process for everyone, and understandably, some UK staffers might have felt like they were getting force-fed advice from a bunch of arrogant Americans with irrelevant qualifications.

Archives for Relocations

Your dream to live abroad is about to come true. You have checked immigration laws, obtained permits, estimated the cost of living and developed a plan to export your life and work abroad.

But there are aspects of a global relocation that you might have overlooked. So before you sublet your place, loan out your car and put your books in storage, consider how you will manage these five challenges of expatriate life.

1. Managing your money

Thanks to the Internet, tracking bank accounts from anywhere is easy. But what will work overseas mean for your tax bill? U.S. citizens are required to report and pay taxes on money earned globally. You can receive a credit for taxes paid in a foreign country but you still need to file a tax return.

All aspiring expatriates should also take an inventory of the debts they must manage. Your move to another country doesn’t excuse you from paying that student loan bill - but you may be able to seek a deferment.

Archives for Relocations

Patrik Runald and his wife Susanne sold their things and left Sweden to build a global career. He and his wife, key employees of a Finnish security software firm, moved to London three years ago, resettled in Singapore and then tried Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

When the Runald’s pine for Sweden they go to the nearest Ikea store, which conveniently stocks Swedish meatballs and beverages. Whenever they want to see ice hockey, they watch games online. Whenever they miss their friends and family, they hop onto Skype or e-mail and exchange photos.

“You learn a lot about yourself when you live abroad and you learn things about your partner,” Patrik says. “Losing your safety net means you rely more on each other as a couple. It forces you to get new friends and make new connections. My relationship with my wife became stronger.”

The roundabout journey from Stockholm to a Muslim country may have puzzled some of their friends, but the Runald’s each come from a family of world-travelers. “I come from a family used to travel and living abroad,” he says. Patrik’s father lives in Singapore and Susanne’s family recently settled in Montreal. He has a sister who was born in the Philippines - fairly exotic for a Scandinavian.

Patrik has a pretty cool but demanding career: He is F-Secure’s security response manager, managing a team of experts who monitor internet based threats 24/7 and devise antidotes for viruses, spam and phishing attacks. He’s not sure where he will go next, but North America holds some appeal to him: “I have started over three times. I’m only 30 years old and I don’t feel ready to settle down.”

Archives for Relocations

Is there a more compelling place to advance your career than China? Paradoxically, if you’re from China, the answer is yes, but for nearly everyone else China is one of the best places to cut your teeth.

India, Brazil and Eastern Europe are among the destinations that would also impress a global-minded recruiter or hiring manager. But China has unique advantages for “westerners” to consider such as the world’s fastest growing economy, and an acute shortage of experienced managers, especially those who can work with English-speaking customers.

“The war for talent in China is bigger than the dot-com days of 1999,” in the U.S., says Shanghai-based Frank Mulligan, an expatriate Irishman, blogger, and recruiter with Accetis International. The war, as Mulligan puts it, is driving up salaries and staff attrition. “The salary increases are nine to ten percent a year. But the real increases are much higher. The average turnover is in eighteen months. But if you change jobs the average increase [in pay] is thirty percent. ”

Those numbers tend to make job seekers listen closely. But of course that’s just the beginning of the story.

Archives for Relocations

Ten years ago, Joy J. Bellefontaine was fresh out of university, looking for adventure and hoping to ease the burden of student loans.

Today, the 35-year-old Canadian is an IT project manager for DHL in Singapore.

Spending her entire professional career abroad, Joy has worked as an embalmer in Japan, earned an MBA in Germany and helped run an IT department in Prague for an international law firm. She exemplifies how someone with an adventurous spirit and enterprising nature can carve out their own long-term expatriate career. 

From Europe to Asia, the trick to traversing cultures, she says, is to be a good guest. “Even though I may live, work and pay taxes in a country, I am still a visitor and I need to respect the culture in which I live,” she says. “Finding the right balance of graceful strength of character and flexibility is an art for an expat. It is something I aspire to achieve.”

After graduating from Carleton University in Ottawa with a degree in political science in 1997, Joy quickly discovered that the available jobs in her field were not to her liking. She had helped cover her university expenses by working as an embalmer and through the connection of a Canadian friend, she landed a job as an expatriate embalmer in Japan.

“I thought it would probably beat an office job in Ottawa,” she recalled.

Archives for Relocations

We think about the jobs. We think about the weather, possibly the schools, and the culture. But how many of us stop to consider infrastructure in choosing where to work?

In the current BusinessWeek, my former colleague Steve Hamm reports on how India’s decaying infrastructure undermines the country’s otherwise stellar economic growth. Hamm says India’s “economic boom is being built on the shakiest of foundations. Highways, modern bridges, world-class airports, reliable power, and clean water are in desperately short supply.”

Infrastructure is a classic business continuity issue. If you can’t keep the water flowing or fuel the power grid, then business-as-usual is next-to-impossible, right? Unquestionably, it’s a bigger headache for employers, rather than for workers. But would you rule out working in India or other locations because of poor infrastructure? Would you choose to live or work in Europe, Latin America or the Philippines instead?