FIGT UK Plus One – Accompanying Partner Support

Families In Global Transition UK asked Thriving Abroad to participate in a panel discussion called Plus One – Accompanying Partner Support and I was lucky enough to travel to the beautiful TASIS campus in Surrey to join presenters from FIGT UK, The Permits Foundation and the International Dual Career Network.

If you’ve never been to a FIGT UK meeting, I’d highly recommend it. Wendy Wilson and Claire Snowdon, with the support of Mary Mitchell from TASIS, put together a highly informative and engaging event. If I relayed every pertinent point, this post would be a long read, so I’ll stick with some of the key takeaways from each of the presentations. The event was captured on video, so perhaps we’ll be able to post some of the presentations at a later date. In the meantime, here’s a quick summary of my main insights from the day.

• FIGT are doing a huge amount of work to understand the experience of, and support globally mobile families. Current issues they are working on include, Talent Management, Gen-Y Global Mobility, changing expat family profiles. In fact, if it’s a current challenge for you, FIGT is probably working on it from the perspective of the globally mobile family.

• Dual career issues pose an increasingly significant barrier to acceptance of international assignments. The stats Wendy quoted showed that 66% of companies say that dual career issues impact their ability to attract employees to international assignments whilst 51% have had employees turn down assignments because of dual career issues.

• We’ve all heard this quote from the 2013 Brookfield Relocation Trends report but it doesn’t hurt to say it because it makes us scratch our heads every time we hear it – Dual career issues have moved up the agenda but partner support has actually decreased.

• The Permits Foundation and our Career Choice and the Accompanying Partner Survey both show that the vast majority of expat partners want to work whilst on assignment.

• The Permits Foundations work has helped to make great strides in allowing expat partners to work, with 30 countries now allowing partners to work freely for any employer, almost all extending those rights to non-married partners and about half to same-sex partnerships.

• But there’s a long way to go and Permits Foundation are working hard to effect changes in other countries with all of the countries that companies see as key locations in the coming 10 years at the top of the list.

• Permits Foundation also recognise that getting a work permit isn’t a complete solution with other factors such as language and equivalence being issues too (again consistent with our Career Choice and the Accompanying Partner Survey).

• IDCN started in 2012 and already has 45 corporate member and 1000 partners registered, of whom about 10% have found jobs through the network. It’s clearly establishing itself as a viable way of helping companies to tap the huge pool of underutilised talent that expat partners represent and provide nother much-needed route for partners to work.

• They are currently active in Geneva, Zurich, Paris and Mexico City but will open its doors in 3 US cities, Basel, Shanghai and Dubai this year.

• I talked about supporting “non-working” partners i.e. partners not in paid employment, and one of the concepts that really resonated with audience members (particularly those who were or had been accompanying partners) was that of engagement; acknowledging partners, their needs and the contribution they make to the success of the assignment.

• The other concept that seemed to inspire some thinking within the group was the thought that working or “non-working” was an arbitrary distinction and that all partners should be supported to find fulfilment whether that is by finding traditional paid employment or other means of fulfilment.

The panel was united in the view that properly supporting expat partners can make a crucial difference to assignment success, employee productivity and employee loyalty. We also agreed that, although progress has been made in some areas, there’s a long way to go before most partners are properly supported.

FIGT UK, FIGT, TASIS The Permits Foundation and IDCN all rely on the support of organisations whose employees are globally mobile. If you haven’t already connected with them, click on these links to see what they’re all about and learn more about how you can help them.

Links

FIGT (http://www.figt.org)

FIGT UK (http://www.figt.org/uk_affiliates)

TASIS The American School in England (http://england.tasis.com)

The Permits Foundation (http://www.permitsfoundation.com)

International Dual Career Network (http://idcn.ch/web/idcn)

Our Thriving Abroad support programmes empower expat partners to take ownership of their own experiences abroad and create fulfilled and purposeful lives for themselves. Click HERE to learn more