MORGAN CHAMBERS: There are a range of issues considered important for moving abroad for expatriates. Noeleen, you make a distinction between two types of expatriates. Can you just talk a little bit about what they are? NOELEEN DOHERTY: Sure. Well, there are many mobile populations now we're beginning to realize within the research literature indeed. Two of the key groups are corporate-assigned or assigned expatriates, company-backed. And another key group are the self-initiated expatriates. And self-initiated being those people who take the decision themselves and fund their own stay abroad. MORGAN CHAMBERS: Having identified the two different groups, they do have a number of things in common, however. Would you like to just talk a little bit about what those commonalities are? NOELEEN DOHERTY: Sure. The self-initiated expatriate and the corporate expatriate do have some baseline commonalities. Self-initiated corporates, people, obviously have a motivation and a drive to move abroad for the foreign experience. They often have a great desire for adventure. They like to travel, like to see different places, and have a real drive to go abroad and move away from their home location and go and stay in a host location. MORGAN CHAMBERS: So your findings have identified eight factors in the model that you've described, and there are some subtle differences there. Can you talk to what some of those differences might be for the two groups? NOELEEN DOHERTY: OK. The range of factors that drives the motivation to move abroad cover a large number of areas. And that includes the location, what location that the person is going to go to. It includes career issues. It includes family considerations. And when we looked at the two different groups, we found that for self-initiated expatriates, they were significantly more motivated, more influenced by the motivation around location and host reputation. Interestingly, that would probably be a factor of the fact that they choose the destination themselves, whereas company-backed expatriates are sent to a particular location. On the other hand, company-backed expatriates were more driven by the career factors, what was in it in terms of career benefit and career development. So they were distinguished quite clearly on those three assets. MORGAN CHAMBERS: So the career factors, do you want to just elaborate a little bit more on what they are? NOELEEN DOHERTY: Obviously, for a corporate-backed expatriate, career drivers are one of the key major issues that they take into consideration. Companies actually position an international assignment as a career benefit. Now, there's a whole area of doubt around whether or not that actually is realized when they come back. But certainly, as one of the come-ons to take up an international assignment, companies usually position it of a career benefit. Self-initiated expatriates tend to or seem to at least consider a career as part of a much more holistic life development process through the international assignment. So career drivers are not the major or primary drivers for them, rather they're a secondary driver. MORGAN CHAMBERS: So there could be indeed some important implications for these two distinctions and the other factors that are involved. What would be some of the implications to think about, or what were some of the questions that were raised for you as a result of the implications? NOELEEN DOHERTY: Yes, I think there are some very clear implications. If we look at it from the first point, from an organizational perspective, there have been some doubt raised about the utility of a self-initiated expatriates to a corporation, particularly around the nature of their risky behavior. They're very driven to be mobile. They're very self-assertive. And so therefore, they get up and go when they need to or when they feel like they want to. And obviously, many companies wouldn't want to have that level of self-driven behavior. And therefore, they can be perceived by organizations to be a little bit risky, possibly, not falling within their particular HR strategy or policy. Organizations don't tend to have particular strategies already developed to manage the self-initiated populations. And so they could be perceived as a group that organizations don't take as a part of their core employee grouping. And I think from an individual point of view, the issue around what benefit they might accrue from being abroad, certainly, there's a literature that suggests that corporate expatriates sometimes don't always accrue the benefit when they come home. And it's also been shown by very few studies at the moment that self-initiated expatriates might also suffer from that when they repatriate. The career capital, the skills, knowledge, and abilities that they're able to develop while abroad might not always be considered positively by companies when they come back again. MORGAN CHAMBERS: So you've identified a number of implications there. There's still more work to be done, more questions to be answered. NOELEEN DOHERTY: Certainly, there's not a very large research base on self-initiated expatriation. It is growing, but there are many questions still around from a corporate point of view. What sort of asset could they be to the company? What sort of motivations and drivers could the organization plan more carefully for with respect to hiring self-initiated expatriates? And also, how do these people integrate with the corporate employees that they are existing employees. From an individual point of view, we still know very little about what drives people. We still don't know what the differences are between people moving from developed to developing, or developing to developing countries from a self-initiated point of view. And also from an individual level, what sort of career capital they accrue, what sort of skills, knowledge, and abilities they are able to gather and develop while they are having a foreign experience. And how they can then use those in a career sense as well. MORGAN CHAMBERS: So you started to answer some of these questions for human resources professionals and organizations, but clearly still more issues are raised. NOELEEN DOHERTY: Yes, many more issues, particularly from a corporate point of view and also from an individual point of view. MORGAN CHAMBERS: Thank you, Noeleen. NOELEEN DOHERTY: Thank you.