US expatriates in Australia - Essay Example

US Expatriates in Australia Australia is one of the most popular destinations for American expatriates. Australia has all that an American could desire; a strong economy, modern cities, conducive climate, stable social and political climate, beautiful beaches, high quality life, marine lover’s paradise, and warm and friendly people. It is an ideal place for someone who enjoys an outdoor lifestyle. However, these are not the only reasons why US end up in Australia. Some of them are living in Australia because they are offering professional services in their various fields of expertise.

There are basically three kinds or categories of US expatriates that are found in Australia. The first category is that of those expats working in Australia for an extended or short period of time. Their stay may be a few weeks, few months or a few years. This group is mainly comprised of US citizens working for or representing US-based companies. The second kind are those experts living in Australia temporarily without the intention of becoming permanent residents of the place. This group mainly comprise of college and university students.

The third category of US expatriates in Australia is that of those who are intending to obtain or have already obtained permanent status through the Australian government. All the three kinds of US experts are in Australia for different kinds of assignments. For example, some of them could be college or university students as mentioned earlier on. However, most of them are professionals either working for US-based multinational corporations that have invested in Australia. Harvey and Novicevic (69) state that in such a case, they have international assignments to complete critical tasks in various departments of their companies like sales and marketing, advertising, or various managerial positions.

Some of the expatriates have been employed by Australian companies or Australian government as well to cover for lack of experts in the local market. Examples of specific occupations identified by expat blog.com (1) for US expatriates in Australia are accountants, aircraft maintenance technicians, property managers, writers, teachers, blogger, physicians and professional players like basketball people. Firms in Australia have come up with new ways of managing US expatriates with the intentions of achieving increased expatriate performance, reducing the rates of expatriate failures and reducing the costs of maintaining expats.

In order to deal with the issue of expatriates retuning before competing assignments, firms have become stricter in their expatriate selection process and have shifted to competency-based expat selection. According to Sanchez et al (102), a competency-based view results to a heterogeneous and diverse set of cognitive perspectives that facilitate superior performance in subsidiaries. The acquisition of expert health insurance, life insurance, and specialty expatriate travel insurance are also important to increase the agreeableness of the experts to stay till the completion of their assigned period.

Firms are also arranging for expatriate auto license to enable experts purchase liability policies in the host country. Culture has little contribution to the failures of US experts in Australia. However, firms conduct pre-departure training before their expert to minimize cultural shock (Varner and Palmer 10). Firms have now become keen about family characteristics. As Hauser (11) notes, family influence is the leading cause of expatriate failures. It affects not only their willingness to relocate oversees but also ability to complete an assignment.

ConclusionThere are three main kinds of US experts in Australia each of them having specific assignments. Some of them reside their temporarily, some for a given time and some are already permanent residents. The use of expatriates may present many benefits to a many US-based multinational corporations operating in Australia. However, firms have to improve their expert management in order to improve their performance, reduce costs of maintaining them and reduce expert failures. New strategies of doing this mainly impact on expert selection.

Works CitedFxpatblog.com. (2009). “American expatriates in Australia.” Online: http://www.expat-blog.com/en/nationalities/american/in/oceania/australia/. Retrieved on 16th November, 2011. Harvey Michael and Novicevic, Milorad. (2001). “Selecting expatriates for increasingly complex global assignments.” Career Development International. (2) pp 69-86.Hauser Jacqueline. (1999). Managing expatriates careers. HR Focus. (2) pp 11.Sanchez Juan, Spector Paul and Cooper Cary. (2000). “Adapting to a boundary-less world: A developmental expatriate model.

” The Academy of Management Executive. (2) pp 96-106.Varner Iris and Palmer Teresa (2002). “Successful expatriation and organisation strategies.” Review of Business. (2) pp 8-12.