From There to Here: Kaleidoscopic careers of skilled migrants

Abstract While there has been an increase in academic interest in worker mobility studies (Andresen et al., 2014), there is still much to learn about skilled migrants’ career actions and outcomes at the individual (Guo and... [ view full abstract ]

Abstract

While there has been an increase in academic interest in worker mobility studies (Andresen et al., 2014), there is still much to learn about skilled migrants’ career actions and outcomes at the individual (Guo and Al Ariss, 2015, Zikic et al., 2010) and contextual levels (Smale et al., 2017). This research addresses this gap in an exploration of how skilled migrants cope with the career disruption caused by their home to host country career transition. By adopting a whole life approach (Litano and Major, 2016) to careers, the findings show that this career transition presents both opportunities and challenges for individual migrants in their quest to balance the work and non-work-related demands in their global Kaleidoscope Careers. The study investigates the careers of skilled migrants beyond their objective career success and the underemployment categorisation, providing an alternative explanation of underemployment among the skilled migrant population. The study presents a more complete overview of the concerns and instrumental career choices skilled migrants make in pursuing a career in the host country over time. Thus, this research makes a number of contributions to the skilled migrant, careers and expatriation literature.

Keywords: Skilled migrants; international careers; underemployment; Instrumental career Kaleidoscope Careers.

Introduction

Increased worker mobility, along with an increased international demand for skilled and specialised labour (Fernando and Cohen, 2015), has resulted in skilled migration becoming a permanent feature of national and international economies (Crowley-Henry et al, 2016). Despite being a potential source of strategic value and competitive advantage for organisations (Zikic, 2015), studies to date underline that skilled migrants, moving to a new country without organisational support, are unlikely to be identified as a source of skilled labour and tend to be excluded from organisational talent pools (Crowley-Henry et al 2016). The extant skilled migrant literature presents skilled migrants as lacking agency (Al Ariss et al., 2012), under-employed (Almeida et al. 2015) and constrained from pursuing their careers in the host country by discrimination (Cook et al., 2011), structures and profession gate-keepers (Crowley-Henry et al., 2016).

While there has been an increase in academic interest in worker mobility studies (Andresen et al., 2014), there is still much to learn about skilled migrants’ career actions and career outcomes at the individual (Guo and Al Ariss, 2015, Zikic et al., 2010) and contextual levels (Smale et al., 2017). This research addresses this gap by utilising the Kaleidoscope Career Model (KCM) (Mainiero & Sullivan, 2005) in an exploration of how skilled migrants cope with the change and career disruption caused by their home to host country career transition. The study also unpacks how skilled migrants, from Poland and the Baltic Republics and currently living and working in Ireland, construct new careers for themselves and their families in the host country. We posit that just like a ‘kaleidoscope that produces changing patterns when the tube is rotated and its glass chips fall into new arrangements’ (Mainiero & Sullivan, 2005. P.106), migrants adjust the pattern of their careers by rotating different aspects in their lives’ to arrange their host country work and non-work lives into new paths and outcomes (Kirk, 2016). We further posit that this rotation of different aspects of the migrants’ lives’ leads to the migrants fashioning and enacting an ‘Instrumentalist’ career script in the host country. Barley and Tolbert (1997) described career scripts as “observable recurrent activities and patterns of interaction characteristic of a particular setting” (Barley & Tolbert, 1997, p.8). An instrumentalist approach to career is where work is seen as a means to other ends (Thomas, 1996), such as an improved quality of life or better future opportunities for one’s family.

The KCM was developed in response to a call ‘for new career approaches’ that incorporated ‘greater awareness of gender, sexual orientation, diversity and global cultures’ (Mainiero and Gibson, 2017, p.na). As the model puts gender in the foreground, it has become more associated with the discontinuous nature of female careers (Mainiero and Gibson, 2017). However, this study utilises the model to unpack the discontinuous careers of skilled migrants, both male and female, and explores the emergence of an instrumental career attitude among the skilled migrant population. The study posits an alternate explanation of skilled migrant underemployment and utilises the KCM to explain the changes in the migrants’ need for varying levels of authenticity, balance, and challenge between their home and host careers. The ‘KCM posits that needs for authenticity, balance, and challenge over the course of a career will be present but arise at different intensities across the life span’ (Mainiero and Gibson, 2017, p.na). This study proposes that the career transition between home and host careers has a similar effect, to the life stage effect, on the levels of authenticity, balance, and challenge needed by the migrant. This research explores the legitimisation of skilled migrants’ careers by the protagonists themselves in the context of institutional influences, such as their family, profession and the state (Thorton et al.; 2012) in the home and host environments.

The research question for this paper was; how does the act of migration, and the career transitions this entails, affect the skilled migrants’ career motivations, actions and outcomes?

The study, in answering the research question, explores the career impact of the broad (political and economic), proximal (personal, family) (Cohen and Duberley, 2015) and temporal contexts (social and historical time) (Elder, 1975). In doing this the study offers a deeper understanding of the varied career influences, actions and outcomes associated with skilled migrant careers (Gunz and Mayrhofer, 2007; Zikic et al., 2010).