Boomeranging: Expat to Repat

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 pla...

‘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 skill...

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 th...

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 ass...

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 org...

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...

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 i...

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 a...

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 abando...

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 h...

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 com...

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...

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 kn...

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 jo...

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 Singa...

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 close...

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’ th...

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’...

“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...

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 Sa...

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 f...

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 a...

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 glob...

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...

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.

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 w...

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 diffe...

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...

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...

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...