In the era when IBM Corp. employees joked that their company’s monogram stood for “I’ve Been Moved,” keeping the crystal in bubble wrap and developing an eye for quick-sale real estate were about the only important strategies for surviving short-tenure assignments with big corporations. With each move, the company provided a well-defined step up the ladder, with a bigger territory or title. That can still happen today, but often a transfer includes some hidden career taxes you should plan for before calling the moving van.
Such preparation becomes even more important considering all the career-jumping workers are doing today. In the fourth quarter of 1997, the Association of Executive Search Consultants (the corporate headhunters’ trade group) counted 3,598 job-filling assignments among member firms, at least a three-year high. For all of 1997, the group reported, firms logged 13,131 searches, an 18 percent jump from 1996. More than half of the 1997 searches were for new positions, suggesting that many workers are plunging into unchartered territory, another reason to approach a transfer or new job with extra caution, experts said.
“People who are realistic understand they have the responsibility for their own careers,” said Rose Emerson, president of Career Relocation Corporation of America, a New York firm that helps companies move workers for new assignments. Emerson said demand for workers is strong enough today that companies are willing to pay to transfer employees or new candidates much further down in the organizational hierarchy than in previous years. That hasn’t automatically translated into greater bargaining power for employees, however.
“Generally, relocation packages are presented to employees and negotiating really doesn’t exist for the masses,” she said. But there are a few things you can research before taking a transfer to a new market, and a few things to do once you’ve arrived to help protect your career should the assignment not last forever.
If you’ve been asked to run a plant in a remote city or fill a position in another company location, do a little on-line homework on the new market before deciding to make the leap, Emerson said. Check local directories and other library reference materials on the new market, or go online at www.americasemployers.com, Emerson’s firm’s posting of major employers by geography. The site offers current advertised positions as well as a basic directory of companies, which can be useful if you simply want to get a feel for what industry is in your new market.
Also, remember that with business priorities changing constantly, your “temporary” assignment could last much longer, or shorter, than what you planned. Managers assigned to international positions have been hit the hardest by this trend, said Richard McAllister, managing director in Chicago for Boyden, a New York-based executive search firm that places senior managers.
“Many people get back from their assignments and there’s really no position for them,” he said. “Or say you go to another state to close a plant. You can make suppositions about what you will come back to, but that’s where you get vulnerable. It used to be that if you did an assignment like that, you could count on coming back and running another plant, but a lot of people find out there really isn’t a job upgrade at the end of the line.”
“If you’ve moved to an isolated spot, I would be thinking about criteria you can use to measure your success there,” said Joan Eagle, an employment lawyer with Schwartz and Freeman, a Chicago firm. The key to shoring yourself up against getting stuck in a market you dislike for longer than you expected, she said, is to either be a very senior executive or someone with highly sought-after skills. If you’re not yet the former, start to make yourself the latter by documenting your accomplishments on the assignment. Eagle recently helped a client mulling a job transfer from Chicago to New York, advising him to get in writing from the firm that if the assignment didn’t work out in a certain time frame, the firm would relocate him back to Chicago as part of a severance deal.
“There aren’t enough really stellar people to go around,” she said, noting that protecting yourself with contingencies only makes you appear more desirable and less vulnerable.
