Boomeranging: Expat to Repat

The stories of accompanying expats, often go untold. With a focus on careers as the primary driver for relocation, it is important to remember the families of those that transition. When Andrea Barton's husband was offered a relocation to Lagos, Nigeria, Andrea was forced to think about her career and how she could reshape it. Throwing herself initially into community initiatives Andrea explored her passion for writing and storytelling. Over the next 13 years and multiple moves, Andrea’s writing drew inspiration from the people, places and communities she and her family found themselves living in. Five books later, Andrea's writing has continued to shape her career and move with her now that she has returned to Australia. Since arriving ‘home’, Andrea has been working on developing her literary network, starting her own company and finalising her novel. Her debut novel, The Godfather of Dance, was published this year and is available now.

With a 25-year career bridging the worlds between Australia and the Middle East, Adam Malouf is now forging a new path, in a new sector and creating a new, albeit familiar life for him and his family. The possibility of unchartered opportunity first attracted Adam to Dubai in 2004, long before the UAE was frequented by the volume of expat Australians who now work and live in the region. Initially attracted to the region as a way of fast tracking his legal career, Adam's career rapidly expanded through a series of investment roles and engagements on multiple board and committees, including the Australian Business Council in Dubai and the Australia Arab Chamber of Commerce and the AICD Middle East advisory committee – reinforcing his contribution in both regions. It was on a family holiday back in Australia when his kids uttered the words ‘Dad we think it’s time, we want to come back to Australia’ that the idea of returning was planted. Having already repatriated once before, Adam knew it was going to take more than a couple of calls to recruiters and a scan of the jobs page in the weekend paper to land the right opportunity. Determined to return with a role - and a meaningful one at that, Adam set about putting together a robust plan to leverage his networks – both in Australia and abroad - as he explored what was possible. The plan worked and Adam returned in 2023 to the role of COO of the University of Wollongong.

When Chelsea Guy came back from Tokyo, and the work experience of the lifetime, she found she had still a pay cheque but didn’t have a role. Chelsea had worked her way through various marketing roles at Toyota when there was an opportunity to put her hand up for a coveted secondment. Her assignment – digital marketing to support Toyota’s sponsorship of the Tokyo Olympics. For Chelsea, not even being struck by the COVID curse, could diminish the experience she gained working with an international team, on the world’s biggest event while learning a new skill in digital. However, when she returned to Melbourne two years later, she found she and her new experience didn’t quite fit, even in the office she had worked for, for many years. Her Japanese experience unleashed her passion for major international events, and 18-months after returning home, Chelsea strategically forged a path to secure a coveted role at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Chelsea has managed to carve out a career that harnesses her global sponsorship experience, elevates her international connections and supports her passion for delivering world-class events. Today, I talk to Chelsea about how her international experience not only lit her career flame but how she has combined all her experiences to create a pathway to her her dream role.

When Angella left Australia at aged 29, she knew she would be gone longer than two years. With expat parents and grandparents, a life overseas was always on the cards. But she didn’t know it would be 22 years. Or that her time overseas would include 13 years in Bahrain. Or that when she eventually came home, she would change her professional identity. For someone who had always worked in talent management and workforce design, and whose career had led her family’s choice of where to live, changing her career path was particularly profound. It was also the result of an evolution not revolution. In this podcast, Angella shares how coming home to Australia and starting again, forced her to evaluate her career path and the turn it took next. She shares her philosophy of ‘saying yes to everything’ to build knowledge and networks and how it is okay for someone who manages careers to ask for help managing their own.

Leonora was extremely excited when she landed in Hong Kong. A dynamic, exciting and unique place with family connections it had the potential to be her forever home. But in 2021 Covid made Leonora feel uncomfortably isolated from family and confirmed for her that Australia was where she wanted to base herself. But she didn’t just flick the switch and jump on the next flight home. That would be too risky for this risk professional. She took the same structured approach that she has used to manage a career in risk and financial services, to managing her move home both professionally and personally. In short, Leonora treated finding a job, like a job and six months later found herself juggling opportunities for employment, business and a board role with a not for profit. For those expat-repats who find comfort in structure, she is a great example of how to build your own confidence in your move back home – by using the skills you already have.

When James Bingham the IT Project Manager left for London in 2014, little did he know that he would come back to Australia almost 8 years later with a new career in an industry that to this day, you can’t do a degree or course in. Yet in a post COVID world, is now one of the most talked about subjects. Workplace strategy. James was working with NBCUniversal in London when he was offered the chance to relocate to New York and keep his overseas adventure alive. In New York, he helped NBCUniversal set up their offices all over the US and Canada. This led him to WeWork, which at the time was leading the world in re-inventing co-working communities and spaces. Here, James was allowed to dream and create a new future of work - at a time when the world need to pivot its thinking about work with the offset of the pandemic. It was also here where he met some kindred spirits and the idea of Alidade, a real estate and workplace strategy advisory company was born. James came home mid-pandemic and has spent the last three years leading Alidade’s presence in Australia and the Asia Pacific. We talk about the challenge of bringing his overseas experience home and the challenge of adapting big market strategies it to a smaller market like Australia - that approaches innovation in a much different way to the Americans! He offers some great advice for Aussies coming home and wanting to start a business in an industry that may have been going at a different speed and scale to Australia.

Mark Lindley left Australia for a life overseas with no job and returned 12 years later in the same situation. But in both scenarios – he had a grand plan underpinned by dreams to choose where he wanted to live and let the career follow. And it worked out for Mark – both in Dubai and today in the Gold Coast. In this podcast, I talk to Mark about how he and his wife chose Dubai for their overseas adventure and the next chapter in their already established careers. And he tells me how after 12 years in senior HR roles which saw him responsible for thousands of staff across the world, he woke up one day and just realised ‘it was time’. Rather than come back to his old home in Sydney, Mark and his wife decided on Gold Coast, a city neither had ever lived in. They were determined to keep their adventure going – and that adventure continued to involve sand! He was also determined to not let a job dictate where he ultimately lived so the Gold Coast decision came way before a job decision was made. I talk to Mark about how he planned his return navigating his global experience and roles into a career he could manage from the Gold Coast, largely remotely and often in his shorts. And he explains why after a career of permanent jobs, he has become is a big fan of the contract. His advice, just make sure it goes for a year.

How does an Adelaidean who considers himself not a ‘big city person’ with no real aspiration to live overseas, end up loving life in Ho Chi Minh City? The is Damien Otto’s story after a generous leader at Commonwealth Bank connected him with career opportunities overseas which eventually saw the Otto family pack their bags for a life in Vietnam. It seemed like the perfectly secure career move. A secondment on a fixed term with his long-term employer who had to date, always looked out for him. Until it wasn’t. At the end of his time in Vietnam, Damian was surprised to be offered a redundancy or the opportunity to find another job on his own at the bank somewhere in Australia. Not the response he was expecting or the way he thought his career with the bank would continue to grow. In this podcast, we discuss how Damien responded and the learnings he would share with other expats who find themselves in a similar situation. It has been four years now and Damien is now living in Melbourne for an organisation that sought him out for the skills he gained in Vietnam. His Vietnamese experience, while it didn’t end quite like he imagined, still looms large in his daily life. He might not be riding a scooter with his partner and two kids down the road for the weekly shop, but Damien still eats a banh mi every week and says the skills he gained in Vietnam have shaped him into the leader he is today.

If you are a future repat thinking life back in Australia might be too slow, then you might fall off your chair during this podcast when you hear that Jacinta Reddan, the former CEO of AusCham in Hong Kong thinks her professional life is just as fast-paced in Cairns! Which is good for Jacinta, who admits her biggest fear of moving to tropical north Queensland and a city she had never lived in before, would be that she would be bored. Jacinta first left Melbourne in her early 20s for an 18-month stint in Hong Kong that turned out to be a decade long stay. Even when she returned to Melbourne to live, Hong Kong wasn’t quite out of her system and six years later after returning to Australia, she and her two young daughters headed back. Maintaining professional contacts and friends has been the thread that runs through the amazing career opportunities Jacinta has had both in Australia and in Hong Kong. In fact, it was a friend and colleague from her early days as a freshly minted journalist at the Warrnambool Standard that led her to her role at Advance Cairns and an exciting new life in Tropical North Queensland after over 20 years in Hong Kong. We talk in the podcast about how she has approached maintaining her connections with Australia, what learnings she gained from coming home the first time, how her two third-culture kids are coping with a home country that feels foreign and about her approach to life in Cairns. Her next ‘expat assignment’. Sneak preview: she is far from bored.

After 21 years with the one employer and a life across multiple countries in Europe and Asia, it is somewhat ironic that Brett Cooper has now ended up in one country with multiple employers. Such is the adventure of an expat-repat! Brett’s career with Phillip Morris started in Sydney and took him to Switzerland, the UK, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. He hadn’t been on a plane until he was 18 but certainly made up for it after seeing his colleagues take the leap and making the international move himself. Taking career chances and moving countries allowed Brett to build skills across corporate affairs, human resources, and general management. Despite having a breadth of skills, Brett was still concerned about coming home and started planning well in advance. Turns out, this wasn’t enough time. In this podcast, we talk about how Brett navigated the recruiter scene back in Australia and why he decided in the end to pursue a portfolio career. We discuss how this style of career has been the best one to not only leverage his skills but to give him the lifestyle flexibility that he needs to manage his kid’s transition back to Australia – and to ensure they lose their American accents!

It took three attempts and a career 180 for Andrew Tiernan to move home to Australia after 18 years overseas but despite the bumpy role to get to Melbourne he says he is now ‘in the right place’. He has gone from a career working in financial services across Asia and Canada to the CEO of his own tech platform start-up signing its first clients. His partner has found his career sweet spot and together they are carving out a great life in Melbourne, despite neither living there before. They believe ‘the adventure doesn’t have to stop’, proving you can take expats out of the adventure, but you can’t never take the sense of adventure out of the expat. Andrew speaks about a couple of key factors behind his eventual success; a shifting mindset about his career, making sure his partner was equally invested in the move and asking for help from his friends and network. We talk a lot about the role his network, past and new, has played in not only helping Andrew with career decisions but on supporting his business. This episode is a great reminder of the power of networks and the opportunity that can unfold if you just ask for help.

In this special podcast episode Margot and Simone chat about the findings of their recent Australian Expat Career Survey and the release of the report ‘Should I stay or should or I go?’ that explored the role work and job plays in an Expat’s decision to come home. With 450 Australians answering the call to take part, they share their 5 key take-aways along with some insights on who took part, how long they’ve been away, what expat's experiences with recruiters and hiring managers has really been like and just how long the average Aussie spends planning their move home. They also talk about how expats can use these findings to support the planning of their return and how mobility professionals who work for organisations managing global workforces can support the repatriation process.

‘Forget Sydney and Melbourne and you’ll be happier’, is the message from podcast guest Liz Ritchie, CEO of the Regional Australia Institute, for expats living overseas and thinking about moving home. The Institute is an independent thinktank and Australia’s pre-eminent source of research, information and policy advice on regional Australia. And according to their research, people living in Australia’s regions are happier than our city-dwellers. Right now, there are more than 70,000 job vacancies advertised in the regions, and factoring unadvertised positions, this number is likely to be double. The most in demand jobs are skilled professionals and mid-to-high skilled trades like engineers, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, teachers and accountants. In this podcast, Liz talks about the professional opportunities for skilled Australian expats looking to be part of the positive trend of people moving to Australia’s regions as part of the Great Regionalisation!

If you were an Aussie living overseas who managed to navigate your way home during COVID, chances are you are very familiar with the Aussie Expats Coming Home Facebook page and its founder LJ Ferrara. What started as a group to help LJ navigate her own journey home in 2018 after 20 years overseas, became a vital source of information and support for thousands of Australians trying to get home during COVID. At many points during the pandemic, LJ and her community were providing answers to expats and their questions faster than what they could source from public and government channels. The power of this community saw it swell in numbers almost overnight. In this episode, we explore how LJ and her expat community helped Aussies during this time and how the community today is supporting expats navigating the logistics of coming home. With planning to come home often intrinsically linked to securing a job back in Australia, we talk about how long LJ thinks expats should be allowing for the transition. And here’s a hint for expat dog owners, 6 months is not enough!

Deborah de Cerff’s career is supporting the careers of expats. For the last 30 years, she has helped individuals and organisations move lives and careers across the world and back again. She is now Founder and Chair of The Employee Mobility Institute advocating, promoting and growing the talent mobility industry throughout Australasia. Over her career, she has seen many changes to how organisations view and treat expat assignments but no period has offered up more changes than right now. The global talent shortage is forcing many organisations to re-think how they view and support traditional expat assignments. In the past, organisations have focussed on ‘global mobility’ but with the demand for talent so fierce and flexible working having a seismic impact on where many roles are now based, the focus is moving towards ‘talent mobility’ or ‘career mobility’. Could this be the end of the word ‘expat’?

Senior Australian expats with global experience are highly sought after for positions on Advisory Boards according to Lousie Broekman, founder and CEO of the Advisory Board Centre. Louise founded the Centre 10 years ago and has grown the Centre to be one of the leading professional bodies for the advisory sector globally with a presence now in more than 20 countries. In this episode, we discuss how Australians with knowledge and experience working in international markets are highly sought after by organisations using advisory boards more and more to test and manage growth opportunities. Louise discusses what organisations are using advisory boards for and the sectors and markets in hot demand. She believes expats with knowledge and experience working in international markets make excellent candidates for Advisory boards – particularly as more and more Australian companies and start-ups look at their global growth ambitions. But she also stresses that joining an advisory board is not a ‘retirement plan’ and outlines what it takes to be an effective chair and board member.

Has the new era of flexible and hybrid working opened up new opportunities for C-suite expats looking to return home? Co-founder and Chief People Office of Leaders on Demand Julia Van Graas certainly thinks so. Julia leads a team of experienced, hands on c-suite executives who deliver on-demand support to CEOs and organisations looking to scale. In this podcast she talks about working with the on-demand team, 85% of whom are Australians who have lived and worked overseas, and the experience they bring to Leader on Demand clients in Australia. And why this style of work, is so attractive to returning Australian executives. We also discuss the impact of flexible and hybrid working is having on how leaders work – and where, which Julia believes will open up more opportunities to senior executive Australian expats. She believes Australia needs to take this opportunity in this period of transition of how we work to really re-think the ‘where’ we work to really unlock Australian talent anywhere in the world.

Career, lifestyle and financial goals are all linked and so is the planning. John Versace is a financial planner at Apt Wealth and leads their expat practice. For the last six years he has talked to Australian expats every day in all corners of the globe, expats carving out careers in tech, medical fields, advertising, entertainment…even a few vets! Australian expats come to John and his team at various stages of the ‘coming home’ process and while the initial inquiry is often financial, work and lifestyle tend to dominate the early conversations. Knowing where someone is in their career and understanding a person’s lifestyle expectations are critical to John to understand an individual expat’s financial needs. In this podcast, John shares conversations he is having with expats right now around career, lifestyle and financial goals and the trends he is seeing when it comes it comes to work back in Australia. He also shares the common misconceptions many expats have about their finances coming home and when is the best time to start planning the move – both for the sake of your finances and your career.

While the headline of a ‘skills shortage’ appears to be welcome news for any Australian expat planning to come home and find a new role, CEO of Advance.org Joanna Pitman warns it may not be the silver bullet expat think it is. Johanna speaks from her experience not only as CEO of the professional network for global Australians who works with industry, government and Australia’s overseas expat community, but also as a 15-year expat herself who returned home in 2007. Expats who are specialists in their field or who have spent 10 to 20 years away from Australia, need to be conscious of their ‘specialised skills set’. This skills set can have advantages delivering Australian organisations skills they ‘didn’t know they needed’ but can also be challenging in a skills shortage where organisations are looking for very specific skills to be met. Johanna offers advice for how expats should approach the today’s local job market and how they should best position themselves and their experience.

Working overseas in much bigger countries and markets for many expats advances their career, however as Jan Lynch discovered when she came home to Melbourne, sometimes this overseas experience can advance yourself out of a career. This was what happened to Jan when she brought her e-commerce career from Hong Kong and China home in 2017. According to Jack Ma, e-commerce in China is the ‘main meal’, in the US it is the ‘desert’. When Jan came home, she realised in Australia, e-commerce was still considered a ‘side-dish’. Not content to work in a ‘side-dish’ industry, Jan decided to start to abandon her e-commerce career altogether and start a new one. And it turns out studying something new and creative like interior design was just the tonic for this repat struggling with reverse culture shock. Jan says coming home was the perfect time to re-skill, follow a passion and start a business, which she did two months shy of the start of the pandemic. Two years on, Jan says her only regret about her career pivot was that she didn’t do it sooner. But underpinning her bravery in starting her business was the resilience and adaptability she built as an expat so perhaps her Hong Kong experience delivered more than just a reason to change careers.