SPECIAL EDITION: WORLD on the MOVE : SNAPSHOT : White-Collar Professionals Join the Global Flow

Bernard Arnold, a personnel officer who worked for several years in the Dutch headquarters of the diversified manufacturing company Unilever, suddenly found himself working out of Unilever’s Brussels office.

The change was exhilarating--and potentially rewarding. “If you want to become a successful manager,” he says, “you have to go and work abroad for some time.”

Arnold’s experience is no accident. Like a growing number of multinational companies, Unilever consciously rotates its younger managers through several of the 75 countries where it does business, to better prepare them for a world in which markets and competition are increasingly not merely national or continental but global.

Such employees are a very different breed from the low-skilled workers who are moving in ever-greater numbers from poor countries to richer ones. The professionals have career paths carefully laid out for them, and they intend to return to the country of their birth or their company’s headquarters.

They constitute what Reginald Apple-yard, a migration expert at the University of Western Australia, calls a “much unheralded” trend toward white-collar mobility.

“This movement of professionals--which we call capital-assisted migration--is already probably in the 300,000- to 400,000-per-year range,” Appleyard says. “Every time you get on an airplane it seems you wind up sitting next to some engineer or accountant going off to work for six months in the Middle East or somewhere.”

Marc Hommel, an international benefits specialist with the London-based consulting firm Towers Perrin, says that as markets become global, companies are trying to project a common image throughout the world. Rotating employees through several countries is one way to achieve that goal.

“If a client is impressed by an accountant in our office in Rio de Janeiro,” Hommel says, “that may eventually translate into more business for our Brussels office.”

It is here in Europe that the phenomenon is most evident. By the end of 1992, the 12 European Community nations plan to mold themselves into a single market, with few national barriers to the movement of goods, services and people. Firms that do business in some EC countries are positioning themselves to operate in others.

“The growing pressures on the market will stimulate the development of ‘sophisticated migration’ of skilled and highly skilled staff to the most active regions in the heart of Europe,” says Gildas Simon, a geographer at France’s University of Poitiers.

For example, Simon notes a shortage of managers and engineers in Britain, Germany and France. Companies in those countries, he predicts, will increasingly have to look elsewhere for skilled employees.

U.S. multinationals have employed large numbers of Americans in Europe for years. Hommel says Japanese firms are following the same path as they buy firms and build factories in Europe and North America.

It works both ways. Michael J. Wilson, a consultant in the international division of the British management consultant firm Noble Lowndes, says European-based companies are increasingly moving professional staff members to Japan and North America.

“The European mega-companies--Shell, Unilever and so on--have done it for a long time,” Wilson says. “Now, more and more companies are identifying potential high-level managers at an early age and showing them how they do business in, say, Germany and the United States.”

Professionals who do well in their native country do not automatically thrive elsewhere. “People who succeed in the global world can’t wear blinders,” Hommel says. “They have good peripheral vision, and they can adapt to new circumstances. They have probably worked in more than one country, and they know how to speak more than one language.”

But the first move abroad can be a jolt even for the most prepared of white-collar professionals. Chris Peirce, who grew up in a small British village, discovered that when General Instruments relocated him, his wife and two children to the center of Paris for 2 1/2 years starting in 1978.

“Living abroad is unsettling,” Peirce says. “It’s hard to put down roots. And you can’t help but wonder what would happen if you lost your job.”

His next stop was Belgium, and he and his family found the Brussels suburbs so hospitable that they are still there. He is now European general manager for his company, since sold to American owners and renamed Quality Technologies.

“I’m more effective because of my experience in other countries,” he says. “The American company can pretty well leave me to run things in Europe by myself.”

Researcher Isabelle Maelcamp in Brussels contributed to this story.