The Commerce Times

Students look at working abroad

Going abroad poses new challenges... and opportunities. Courtesy of Miguel Syyap

March 21, 2010 0 | By Ksenia Voynova

We all know that working abroad requires mountains of paperwork. But as with traveling for any reason, business travel can have psychological implications – namely, culture shock.

Although many European and Middle Eastern countries are protectionists when it comes to their local workforce, but now even multinational organizations based in these regions are hiring people from outside.

A highly diverse and global workforce has advantages and disadvantages. For instance, one of the major struggles for newly hired employees from abroad is adjusting and finding new friends.

“The biggest challenge is not having any friends. You don’t have a support network. Everything is strange right down to the type of yogurt you’ve never seen. You need a guide,” said Dale Carl of Ryerson University, as he described his first experience in the Middle East. Carl is a Director of Graduate Students, coordinator of international programs and co-author of Culture, Leadership and Organizations: The Global Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness Study (GLOBE) of 62 Societies (2004).

You don’t have a support network. Everything is strange right down to the type of yogurt you’ve never seen.

Carl suggested that some of the ways to make friends in a foreign country are through sports or various affiliations, “Join a diving club or a gym that has a squash court. Also there are expatriate associations, Canadian business groups in any respectably sized city”.

Another inevitable challenge is the language. Despite the fact that many employees are hired by corporations outside their home-country without knowledge of the local language, it still tops as an extremely valuable human asset.

“[You] should not expect people to always speak English if you don’t speak the language,” said Carl.

Carl encountered the difficulties of the language barrier while working in Norway. He had gone grocery shopping, but was faced with more than 40 types of bread behind the counter and consequently did not know how to ask for the right kind. Regardless of why a person is travelling, it is always a good idea to learn at least the basics of the national language before going abroad.

But language and lack of support are not where culture shock ends.

“Relationships between men and women, and relationships based on power distance, they are the two biggest stumbling blocks,” Dr. Carl said. Calling your boss by a name, instead of their title, for instance, can appear unprofessional and put a shadow on your relationships with the supervisors. It is best to ask one of your colleagues what they call their boss in order to be fully prepared and polished.