The world has become very interconnected. This is no surprise, the evidence is all around us and continues to increase. What this actually means though is more complex than it appears.
One area this impacts greatly is the workplace. More and more people are working internationally. This continues to largely be either through large multinationals or cheap labor that is imported to do largely unskilled or minimally skilled labor.
There is also a continuing increase in skilled and educated labor working overseas for other than huge multi-nationals. The infrastructure to support this is often not in place. The current structure (visas etc.) support the two modes mentioned above.
But I see an increasing number of opportunities for countries that encourage entrepreneurship and high skill jobs. I relocated to Malaysia and in doing so did a bit of research. It is difficult to get a long term visa in most countries without a full time job (and given the complexity of hiring foreign workers this often means dealing with companies that do a lot of it – in the 2 categories mentioned above).
Career prospects are enhanced with international experience. One way to get a jump start on your career is international education. This has been popular for a long time but is becoming more and more popular. Students studying in London can get the benefits of international experience (unless they are from England, obviously) and enjoy the great city of London and accessible travel to Europe.
The importance is to truly gain an international perspective. Those in the USA have the greatest problem as knowledge workers in most other countries are much more aware of the global economy. Europe is an easy way to get started and is packed with lot of great schools and processes in place to make it easy to become a student.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I believe the most important factor for a career is finding something you love to do, but within those possibilities it is nice to know the payoff of different college degrees.
Those that see Asia as the economic engine for the next 50 years might well be tempted to look at attending school there. There are plenty of options though it may take a bit more work on your part to make it happen. I think attending at least some portion of college internationally is a great idea as is getting international work experience early in your career.
Related: How to Balance the Benefits of Foreign Workers and the Potential Damage to Citizen’s Job Prospects – Leading Economic Freedom: Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland
I have long thought the binary retirement system we have primarily used is less than ideal. It would be better to transition from full time work to part time work to retirement as people move into retirement. According to this study, from the University of Michigan Retirement Research Center, the phased retirement option is becoming more common.
Macroeconomic Determinants of Retirement Timing
The paper doesn’t really focus much on what I would find interesting about the details of how we are (or mainly, how we are not) adjusting to make partial retirement fit better in our organization (the paper is focused on a different topic). The paper does provide some interesting details about the changes with retirement currently.
Related: Career Flexibility – 67 Is The New 55 – Retirement Delayed, Working Longer
Congress gives Wall Street public backing for derivatives trading again: http://t.co/PtBePRGuhy Oh joy.
— John Robb (@johnrobb) November 11, 2013
It is no surprise those we elect that have shown there primary concern is providing favors to those giving them lots of cash have given the wall street crowd that showers them in cash what they want yet again. As long as we keep electing these people they will keep providing benefits to those giving lots of cash that the rest of society is stuck paying for.
Read more about this huge fiasco: Congress Sells Out To Wall Street, Again!
Even ill-informed politicians now can’t pretend they don’t know the risks they run by providing these favors. But they figure they won’t have to be accountable – they haven’t been held accountable so far. So they are probably right that they won’t be held accountable when the taxpayers suffer huge losses and the taxpayers have to again bail out the too big to fail institutions and savers have to again bail out the too big to fail banks and…
As bad as the economy has been since the to-big-too-fail crowd created economic calamity it is amazing it hasn’t been much worse. The extraordinary efforts of the Fed have been amazingly successful. I worry they have put us in an extraordinarily risky place but so far the results have been remarkable. Hoping such slights of hand (plus huge transfers of wealth from middle class savers to to-big-too-fail speculators – in the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars – so it isn’t like there are not huge suffering by millions of people – even those that were not thrown out of work) will allow continued reckless giveaways to those paying politicians is a very bad idea.
But it is no surprise those we elect have chosen that course of action. It seems we are very unlikely to learn without a real depression being forced by decades of extremely foolish behavior by our elected officials in Washington DC.
Related: Continuing to Nurture the Too-Big-To-Fail Eco-system – The Risks of Too Big to Fail Financial Institutions Have Only Gotten Worse – Adding More Banker and Politician Bailouts is not the Answer – Failure to Regulate Financial Markets Leads to Predictable Consequences (as does letting big contributors create “regulations” that are nothing more than government granted favors to huge organizations) – Congress Eases Bank Laws, 1999, while risks were stated by those not willing to lie down for Wall Street Lobbyists (few though they were)