Boomeranging: Expat to Repat

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.  

Data and tech.  It is hard to find a skill and an industry in higher demand right now.  So when Wage Reis came home in March 2020 after two years working for Facebook in London working with the world's largest advertising agencies she too was confident that having this juggernaut brand on her CV would at least start some conversations. Only it didn't. After six months of reacquainting with family and sending her CV to 20 recruiters and struggling to get even a phone call returned, she realised getting a job back home was going to be much harder than she originally thought. Most Australian expats like Wage are coming home to a much smaller market – few see any advantages.  However fast forward 18 months and Wage has worked out how to turn Australia's smaller size to her advantage.   Wage is now working for a London-listed, global company and has founded the Women in Data and Analytics community.  And she does this from, well, anywhere she likes.  This globe trotter is now an Australian-based digital nomad who has made Brisbane, the Whitsundays and Melbourne her office in the last year. Find out how Wage turned 12 months of feeling like an imposter in her own country to re-igniting her global career and creating opportunities that she now admits, she could never have done in London.

For Cyber Security expert Claire Pales, starting her own business was always on her ‘career to-do list' but it came about sooner than she expected. She certainly wasn't planning for it to be right after returning from four years in Hong Kong with two young children in tow.  However, some difficult experiences with local recruiters in Melbourne delivered her the ultimate blessing in disguise – it showed her a gap in the market.  And her experience as an expat, gave her the confidence to do something about it.   Today Claire runs her own advisory service helping companies identify and then hire the right cyber security specialists.  She runs a podcast called The Security Collective, has published two books and now provides advice to boards on cyber security risks.   By her own admission, Claire is risk adverse and she has a stellar career that speaks to this!  So while living overseas didn't instil in Claire necessarily a sense of adventure, she says it taught her how to problem solve, be resourceful and how to fall on your feet in a foreign country.  She said, “It showed me a new way of living and gave me the confidence to start something new.”   She shares not only her story but what skills she learnt as an expat that have helped her build her businesses and the life she now enjoys.  

Kate's husband had been buying her books on gardening for years. But as a marketer in financial services for over 10 years in the UK, planting was always a passion pursuit for Kate not a professional one.   Coming home and settling in Brisbane, Kate thought she would continue her career in financial services only to be bluntly informed by a local recruiter that her career would not continue in Brisbane unless she was prepared to go into the mining sector.    So, she threw herself into the project of building a house which eventually led her to focus on the clay patch that was her garden.  In Kate's words, forgetting the garden is like “buying a beautiful dress but forgetting the shoes”.  To address her garden, Kate needed to get to know the native plants that thrive in Queensland so she enrolled herself in a local landscape gardening TAFE course. She loved it so much she picked up a couple of subjects in horticulture and before she knew it, she had completed this course as well.  For Kate, it was like a light bulb switching on, all of a sudden she found this amazing thing that she loved.   Several years ago, she started her own business ‘Horte Couture', a landscape gardening and design business.  In creating her business, she has been able to bring to the table not only her previous business and marketing skills but all the skills she built as an expat – tenacity and persistence being the top two.   Since COVID, her business has thrived (yes, pun absolutely intended!).  Just like she did when Kate returned to Australia, people are pivoting their lives and the home has never been more important.    Inside and out, plants are playing a role.

New York, New York…If you can make it here, they say you can make it anywhere. And Scott Cooper is living proof.  Scott initially went to New York following his partner and her career. He didn't have a job or people he knew and to make his situation even more challenging, this expat thought his new life was the right time to ditch his day job in civil engineering and move into digital marketing.   But there was one thing Scott knew how to do well, a skill that is universal the world over – Scott knew how to hustle. Over his first nine months in the city that never sleeps, he met friends of friends, contacts of contacts and was at Meet-Up groups three or four nights a week. Soon Scott was representing an off-Broadway play, a guitarist and a number of small tech companies. Scott says that in the US, people are more likely to give you a go at something new if they can see you are ambitious and passionate while in Australia, people struggled to give him a go because they couldn't see beyond his civil engineering background.  In less than a year, Scott was offered his first US permanent role working for Waywire Networks, a video curation platform where he quickly worked up to the role of editor.  His career in helping grow companies had started.   After New York, Scott established himself with an Australian tech start up in San Francisco, and after San Francisco after nearly five years in the US, he returned to Melbourne and continued to work for businesses in their hyper-growth phase. Now, after a career of starting again and helping companies begin and grow their own journeys, he is the COO at Versus Merch - just one of what is quickly shaping up to be a growing suite of businesses that he co-owns and runs.  Scott is still hustling but this time the confidence of a man who made it in New York.

Trena Blair will be the first to admit, she didn't want to come home from New York.  In her two and half years in the city that never sleeps, she had met all three of her New York goals – to volunteer at the Met, to study at NYU and to secure a role. And she was happy. Very happy. But a career opportunity back home in Sydney for her husband, meant their New York dream had to come to an end.    Well, at least for him.    For Trena, coming home with a job and a NY-based boss, meant she was able to jet back to her home away from home every three months.  However, after three years in this role, it was time for a new challenge, and this meant leaving the company and her regular work trips to New York.   Despite this, New York never strayed too far from her consciousness.   Trena took three months off to contemplate her next move and to complete the Australian Institute of Company Directors course.  At the course graduation event, she had a 30 second conversation with the person sitting beside her who had asked her ‘so, what's your pitch?'  She said, ‘payments, travel and lived and worked in New York.' The stranger told her to call him the next day and so began the start of her next career chapter.   Trena is the founder and CEO of FD Global Connections, specialists in US market entry strategies for Australian companies. Using her experience of the US market, particularly New York, she has created a niche service for Australian businesses and a new legitimate excuse to regularly travel to her favourite city outside of Australia.

People often do extreme things to avoid Sydney house prices but none more extreme than Chris Edwards and her husband.  Fifteen years ago when staring down an exorbitant quote to renovate their tiny, inner city cottage – they decided to take an easier option.  Move to Singapore. On their own coin and for Chris, without a job.  After a start in publishing, Chris went out on her own and established Honeycombers – a lifestyle guide to all things Singapore that has now grown into a group of publishing and digital services businesses.  Four years ago, after 11 years in Singapore, Chris and her family moved back from the little red dot to set up life in Byron Bay. Chris spent three years planning the move back home so that her businesses could manage itself locally – this involved working with her team to make sure there was a skilled and trusted management team and structure in place in Singapore. This worked pretty well – until just before COVID when her General Manager resigned and Chris found herself managing her Asian businesses in the midst of a pandemic from her home office in Byron. She weathered the lows, which included seeing revenues fall off a cliff, and experienced the highs of seeing her team at their creative best.  In true expat spirit, her resilience has paid off and she has some key learnings to share about what is and isn't possible for managing international businesses remotely.  

A special episode dedicated to all the COVID expat-repats – those Aussies who came home in the pandemic either as a direct result, a planned moved or in some cases just because they were passing through Australia when it all hit.   Podcast producers Margot Andersen and Simone Pregellio share the expat stories from both the podcast and six months of conversations with Australians who have been part of the 600,000 contingent who have come home during COVID.   On top of the normal repatriation challenges, these COVID repats have had some unique challenges.  Navigating closed borders, coming home in the midst of lockdowns and trying to re-establish networks over Zoom.   All while big changes are happening in the job market and stories surface of an impending skills shortage.   In this episode Margot outlines the challenges and the opportunities she is discussing with expats today and how expats sitting overseas can prepare for their move back during these uncertain conditions.

It was the Aussie sense of adventure that took journalist Prue Clarke to New York in 2000, it was the American dream that kept her there for 19 years.    Like most expats, Prue's story started with a plan to be away for ‘just a year'.  But when her ‘just a year' included studying at the prestigious Columbia University, reporting on September 11 and meeting her very own Mr Big, plans change.   After two years in New York, and reflecting on her experience with September 11, Prue decided she wanted to report more on the world's ‘why' than its ‘what'.  She took a six-month job in Ghana in Africa which started a six-year tenure reporting for US and global publications from the developing world and sowed the seeds for her non-profit organisation New Narratives that she still leads today. New Narratives supports news media in low- income countries of Africa and the Pacific to empower them to tell their own stories.   New Narratives and journalism in Africa have remained constant in Prue's life which has taken her from New York to London, back to New York and then home to Sydney in 2019, with an American husband and two internationally-born children in tow.   Managing such a life Prue attributes to ‘America's dream big' mentality and the influence of a city like New York where everything feels possible.   She is now living in a world now that feels very restricted and, in this podcast, ponders the opportunities and risks for Australians like herself trying to maintain global organisations and connections.  After spending nearly two decades reporting on both Australian and global stories, Prue also reflects on the impact the departure of hundreds of thousands of Aussie expats from overseas roles back home will have on ‘brand Australia' internationally.

Kissed on the backside by a fairy, is how expat Andy Whitford has described his luck being relocated back to Australia with an Asia Pacific role during COVID.   After 15 years in Shanghai and Hong Kong and a previous expat life of six years in London, Andy was aware of how hard it could be to return home without a job.   In recent years, this former CEO and Director of multiple Australian Chambers of Commerce in Asia had tried but failed to pursue board positions with Australian companies because he wasn't ‘local' to Sydney or Melbourne.  In one head-hunter's words, ‘a board director wants to be able to have a drink at the club with you'. Leadership, Asian experience (and Zoom it seems) was not enough.   Fortunately, in 2019, Andy was approached by an organisation that thought differently which is why in Hong Kong he was able to transition from leading a bank to leading a successful UK based research, intelligence and campaigns consultancy. From the outset, this organisation had sought his Asian know-how, his deep networks and his start-up experience.  His campaign knowledge – was taught on the job.   Andy acknowledges how lucky he was to come home with a great role and to be able to then live in his home-town of Melbourne surrounded by family.  He reflects on what has and has not changed for expats returning home over the last two decades. With record numbers of Australian talent coming home over the last year, we ask him what he thinks needs to change to better help professional expats when they return and for Australia to maximise the brain gain opportunity.

“I wish I knew how it would be to be free.” Nina Simone     This was the song that Michael Ellis used to describe his year of lockdown in the UK and his decision (and subsequent adventure) to get back home after 19 years living in London.     In February, when UK COVID deaths were at over 1,800 a day, Michael secured a spot on a very happy DFAT repatriation flight.  Prior to COVID, Michael had no intention of coming home.  He had a great career and established life overseas and as long as he could come home at least once a year, it was a lifestyle he wanted to continue.     But the forced separation from family, particularly in the lead up to his father's 80th birthday, forced a re-think, as it has for so many Australians living overseas.     Upon returning to Australia after a year of living on his own in lockdown, Michael took advantage of his new found freedom in Australia with an epic road trip from Darwin to Melbourne following the compulsory two weeks of quarantine.     Now back, he is now navigating and enjoying a very different life back in Australia.  But he has not yet answered the question, will he stay?

For Change Manager Sarah , coming home from ten years in London was a change she thought she could handle. Like any project, she planned ahead. She started thinking and planning two years in advance, secured a job and didn't lose so much as a sock during the relocation thanks to her expertise in project management and excel. So why did Sarah, who had spent a decade advising global companies in change, ring a friend after six weeks of arriving home and ask the question ‘What have I done?' Fast forward two years and Sarah is one happy and settled Sydney-sider but she acknowledges that in the beginning she was not quite prepared. For Sarah, ‘reverse culture shock' was very real but once she was aware of it, she found it easier to ride out the rest of her change curve. Along with her story, Sarah shares her tips for others embarking on the repat journey.

Nicole had a great career in Australia as a well-regarded journalist and newsreader with Sky News when her hotelier husband James was offered a new role, first in Hong Kong and then in the ancient Chinese city of Xi'an.   For Nicole, the initial transition was challenging – her whole professional identity until that time had been ‘journalist', and the role of English-speaking newsreader didn't quite work in mainland China.   Wanting to work, but realising she needed to change what ‘work' would look like, Nicole began building a portfolio of roles which included freelance writer, MC and media trainer. She built her portfolio steadily while she lived in Hong Kong however, she found herself pivoting again in Xi'an, when language became more of a consideration.   While living in Xi'an, Nicole returned to her roots and started interviewing differing people she met – but not for the news rather to capture her experience living as one of 1,000 expats in a city of 9 million people.   Returning to Australia in 2017, this research ultimately became the foundation for her latest role – best-selling author.  China Blonde was released in late 2020 and is Nicole and her family's story of living in Xi'an. As blondes.

Michael Waite, his wife Whitney and three kids were on an 18-month global adventure, popping back to Australia for the Southern Hemisphere summer to visit family when COVID and family tragedy struck.  With travel grounded, the former Seattle-based family had to put away their backpacks and establish a home living in between Normanville and Naracoorte, two regional towns in South Australia, starting a total rethink on their three-to-five year plan. With regional South Australia home for the immediate future, Michael, a senior finance executive who ran for State Treasurer of Washington State in 2016, embarked on an unusual COVID side project, starting the Naracoorte News, which created his own headlines. Now he and his wife, a highly experienced paediatrician, are keen to ignite their careers while living in a regional area.  Facing multiple challenges of trying to reshape international experience into a local market and a regional one at that, the Waite's are asking themselves if staying is more short than medium term.

For six years prior to annus horribilis, Bridget John had been living a globally nomadic life between home bases in France, Morocco and Australia. She balanced work as a freelance brand consultant with building her vintage Moroccan textiles business all from the road. It was a lifestyle she had curated for herself borne from her love of travel and living overseas.  Bridget's experiences of living abroad included living in England as a child and in her 20s and moving to the Basque Coast of France in 2015 with Quiksilver as the Global Trade Marketing Director at their global headquarters. After a few years of carrying her career and laptop across Europe and Australia, she finally set up a home in Marrakech in 2019. A ‘quick trip' home to Melbourne in February 2020 for two weeks to visit family has turned into an extended stay and a total re-think of her business and life on the other side of the world. Bridget shares how she pivoted her business back here in Australia, while packing up an apartment in Morocco remotely, and her hopes for positive change within the digital nomad community.    

Over the last few years, Shane Masters has tried three times to come home. Past attempts have been thwarted by a lack of job opportunities which matched his background and experience.  When he first left home for overseas after university, it was easier to get a job as a lawyer in London than it was at home.  Then it became easier to stay overseas because that was where the demand for his experience in Ag Tech came from rather than a job in Australia where, as he was once told, despite his many years of international experience and new MBA, he would have start from the bottom.  Again. Shane finally cracked the code to returning home in 2020 after proactively building networks in Australia while overseas.  With the job opportunity and family sorted – you could think it was finally plain sailing for Shane. Until you added COVID into the mix. It took Shane and his family five months, countless cancelled trips, $52,000 worth of booked flights and a nervous drive to Belgium from France (to avoid a train strike) to finally arrive back in Adelaide in August 2020. The six-month ordeal put enormous additional stress on Shane, particularly when he returned home to hear the unsympathetic chorus of some Australians who thought ‘all expats could have come back when the Government told them to…' If only it was that easy. Shane has been long aware of the challenges to mental health being both an expat and repat can bring.  He founded the ‘Australia Day Games' when he was living in Sweden to provide a supportive network for Australians living away from home. Now back in Adelaide, he is also acutely aware of the mental health challenges returned expats are facing, particularly in the face of COVID. He's even thinking of bringing the Australia Day Games….to Australia.  So get your inflatable sharks ready, Shane and his throwing competition could be coming to a town near you.

Turning the mic on Insync Network Group founder Margot Andersen to hear her expat tale and motivation for setting up the network and podcast.

Rugby boots and guitars – these are Ben Deguara's secret weapons for integrating into a new life overseas. And he should know – he has done it twice already at opposite ends of the world.   Ben is our series first “double boomeranger”. His first expat journey was to London for four years, starting an overseas career in financial services on the day of the global financial crisis. He returned to Sydney and just when he was getting back into the groove of Sydney life two years later, he was offered an opportunity to move to Hong Kong.   Now he's back – but doesn't rule out a third overseas adventure in the future.   Ben approached his second expat journey very differently to his first. The experience of coming home from London and facing not only friends and family who couldn't relate to his overseas journey but the indifference shown by recruiters to his international experience meant he was a lot more prepared the second time around.   In Hong Kong, he made sure he kept his connections in Australia close and started preparing for his return nearly a year before he finally made the leap.   As for rugby boots and guitars – Ben used his hobbies as ways to meet lifelong friends that he has today. So if he does go again, I am sure these are the first things that get packed.

Some people collect snow domes from countries they visit, Glen and his wife collected children. Their stints as an expat couple in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore all symbolically marked with the birth of kids – and doubly celebrated in Hong Kong with the arrival of twins.   When they arrived in Brisbane after almost two decades abroad, they faced a dual challenge of dealing with the grief of the end of an overseas adventure and four children who struggled to name all of Australia's states and territories.   Like many expat families, Glen wanted his kids to have the right balance of feeling like a global citizen at the same time as having a good sense of where they belonged. So after ten years in Singapore and another decade before this in Tokyo, Hong Kong and London, Glen and his wife made the difficult decision to return home.   This was a bit of a shock for the kids who had only ever really experienced Australia on holidays. Glen recounts the family attending the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast and seeing his kids barrack for Singapore.   For Glen and his wife, the transition was tough too. His wife lost her network and for Glen, he had to adjust to creating a career in Brisbane, after having a big role in a regional hub like Singapore.   But what started with a sense of grief, Glen now says is the best decision the Faltings have ever made. The kids are becoming little Aussies and Glen and his wife have started their own law firm – using their global contacts and experience to help overseas businesses in Australia.  

For Mandy, the decision to move to the Hague with her family was a case of taking an opportunity to walk in the shoes of the people she had spent her career advising.   As a HR professional in global mobility for Shell, there was no better way to understand the experience of the expat and then repat than to live it herself!   Mandy's journey wasn't a solo one – she left Melbourne for the Netherlands in 2008 with her husband and her 18 month old son.  She reflects that the expat journey was different for every family member. For her engineer husband, the early years were focused on looking after their young son whilst trying to study in a foreign language. When they moved to Poland, he pursued remote learning and has created a new career path.  For their son, he arrived in Australia on the cusp of high-school as a ‘third-culture' kid with no experience of what it is like to grow up Australian.   In some respects, it was Mandy's day-to-day world with Shell that was the most consistent. She talks about the expat experience for family members being ‘not static'. It changes all the time for those who have had to adjust around the family member with the job and it is important to ‘check-in' regularly.   After a decade overseas, Mandy relocated back to Melbourne with Shell, only to find that the Australian head-office had moved to Perth! However, her experience of working as part of a global team where working remotely and across different time zones is the norm meant this wasn't a hurdle and she was probably more prepared for COVID than most of us.    

Jan told friends she was going to Hong Kong for a two-year adventure.    Lucky no one held her mail, because she returned 18 years later via a life and career detour to the UK and the US.   The initial lure overseas was the chance to launch HSBC's world first chip-based technology for payments cards.  Completing a unique project such as this meant that when she was finished, she was in hot demand and after Hong Kong moved to London and from there, to the US working with MasterCard.   Along the way she met her American husband Larry and spent years in Arizona as step-mum to two American teens.   After more than 15 years, her employer asked Jan “Where to next?” and to her own surprise, she said “home”.  While it took 12 months to plan a role back home, it took Larry 60 seconds to grab shorts and thongs and say, “I'm in!”   While she returned home with a role, her professional life was challenging.  A lack of a local network nor an understanding from the market of what she had done in her career created a sense of disconnection.  When she went out to find a new role – her 20-year international career in financial services was overlooked by the major banks. It was a difficult time.   But while the traditional banks weren't interested – Australia's fintech sector certainly was.  Jan is now working at Novatti, an innovative high growth payment services company and is an active mentor to founders and investors through work with Stone and Chalk.   Her move from Sydney to Melbourne during COVID ironically has been her least dramatic.  She is finally using her international skills to their greatest potential.  Larry is still wearing shorts.  

Jane had a coveted job as the Head of HR for the AFL when she decided to pack it all in to go to New York with nothing but a suitcase, a three-month tourist visa and a pair of itchy feet.   Arriving during the GFC, her skills in HR and leadership were in hot demand, but for all the wrong reasons.  One of her first career defining roles was helping American Express downsize their finance department by over 1,000 jobs.   It was a bleak but challenging start to a five-year stint in New York, a city she always loved and still calls her second home.  Long brunches, a love of film festivals and devotion to the NFL, all positive by-products.   While in New York she held a number of senior HR positions with different financial services companies.  She describes her time in New York as career defining, yet when she got home local recruiters considered her having been ‘out of the market for the last five years' and showed an open hostility towards her international experience that still shocks her today.   She spent twelve months looking for a role back home. That's a lot of coffees.   Combined with facing challenges in the job market, Jane felt restless – Australia wasn't the country she had left.  And she wasn't the same either.   But after 12 months, she started to find her groove using her resilience and change skills to undertake a number of contracts and advisory jobs.  She now actively seeks out expats when she is advising businesses that are start-ups or growing – both for their resilience skills and their networks.   She no longer feels the restless itch to return to New York. Well, almost.  As long as the NFL isn't on.  

Bryce was at the end of a two-year working visa in the UK working for SkyNews when he decided he wasn't quite ready to come home.  He was working for the entertainment desk and one day when habitually swapping his copy of “Heat” magazine for the finance desk's copy of the “Economist” he stumbled on a job ad for a role that “no one ever gets”.  He applied anyway, took a sick day and a Eurostar to Paris and the next ten years, as they say, are history.    Over the next decade, on top of working for the International Chamber of Commerce as the Director of Communications, he met his wife, a professional dancer with the Moulin Rouge. Originally from Brisbane, his wife had already been in Paris for many years and like Bryce, initially thought she would end up with someone a ‘bit more exotic' rather than a fellow Aussie but love in the City of Lights had other ideas.   Together they built a life in Paris, also writing books about their experiences, before returning home ten years later with two children (with French passports) in tow.   Arriving back into Sydney, Bryce recounts enormous culture shock, somewhat brought on by trying to adjust to the light and heat of an Australian summer after 12 European winters.  He talks about the first few months of uncertainty, the feeling of ‘what have we done?' and how quickly the rose-coloured glasses for Paris were put on.   He was fortunate to have secured a job as Executive Editor of the Woman's Weekly before returning home - but it wasn't easy. He describes during the job search, many conversations with people who seemed to ignore or discount his 12 years abroad, preferring to talk about the last job he had in Australia.  He said it was like his career and life overseas had been ‘paused' in the minds of many people.   Fortunately, Bryce's time in Paris had taught him the power of reinvention and resilience.   After the Women's Weekly, Bryce continued his journalism career with stints at the AFR and 60 Minutes and now is a strategic communications adviser for Domestique Consulting co-author of Unmasked Turia Pitt and A Mother's Story by Rosie Batty plus the host and creator of Squiz Kids.   He and his family now live in Brisbane where they have settled and got used to the light.