Having time to see the world is one of the best parts of retirement for travel buff Ralph Woodhull of McHenry.
Little wonder, then, that Woodhull didn’t hesitate when Quaker Oats Co. asked him last summer if he would spend about eight weeks in Shanghai, China, all expenses paid. The catch? He would help the company start up an oatmeal and ready-to-eat cereal plant.
Woodhull, 69, an engineer who retired from Quaker in 1994, was one of five retirees the company hired to help launch the Shanghai plant. While most spent a couple of months there last fall, Dave Johnston, a retired cereals-production department manager from Quaker’s Peterborough, Ont., plant, is still across the Pacific, training workers and fine-tuning equipment.
It all started with a surprise phone call from Quaker. “I thought someone was pulling my leg,” recalls Johnston, 60. “If you’re looking for an opportunity to experience something new and different, I would recommend it. Certainly China is something new and different for me.”
Yet Johnston’s experience is becoming more common at Quaker and other companies. Retirees offer years of experience and a flexible schedule–ideal assets for short-term international jobs.
For the workers, it’s a chance for exotic travel on the company’s tab and a welcome paycheck.
“Our retirees went over and did an excellent job for us,” says Bruce Nicholas, director of human resources at Quaker Oats.
Though Woodhull has been back for about five months, he is still reveling in the trip. “I call it my Chinese adventure,” he says. Among the highlights were his travels to the poverty-stricken interior of China, a spot few American tourists see. Besides being stunned by the crude living conditions, Woodhull good-naturedly recalls the workers’ sense of humor. “They laughed at my pointed nose. They thought my shoes were funny. I’ve got videotapes of them laughing at me,” he says.
While Woodhull was working 12-hour days, his wife, Ruth, was learning Chinese art and paper cutting, seeing the sights and going shopping. On the weekends, Woodhull accompanied her on excursions to Beijing and the Great Wall of China.
Quaker isn’t the only company that is turning to retirees for short-term expatriate assignments. As companies increasingly look to expand overseas, many are finding a shortage of qualified candidates willing to take the jobs. A lot of younger employees simply aren’t interested because they don’t want to disrupt their family lives and spouses’ careers.
“As dual-career families have become commonplace, it’s become much more difficult to get a trailing spouse to go along,” says Christopher Nadherny, senior director at Spencer Stuart, an executive search firm in Chicago. “Those families have built up big support strings, from babysitters to where to get dinner on the way home from work. They don’t want to push all that aside and turn things upside down.”
A recent National Foreign Trade Council survey of 189 companies with a total of 46,900 expatriates suggests that finding candidates for overseas assignments is a top business challenge for 63 percent of the companies. One big factor is the growing number of two-career families.
Nearly three-quarters of expatriates are married, and more than half (57 percent) of the spouses were employed before the assignment. About 20 percent of the trailing spouses in 1996 were employed during the assignment, up from 11 percent a year earlier. Experts say difficulty obtaining work visas is the main hurdle to spouses finding a job overseas.
The trailing spouse is not always a wife. The number of female expatriates, estimated at 14 percent of the total in 1996, is expected to represent one in five expatriates by 2000.
Besides the issue of employment for the trailing spouse, many employees are reluctant to uproot their children for an overseas position. As result, the number of expatriates with no children accompanying them grew in 1996 to 43 percent from 40 percent the prior year.
Companies are going overboard to lure families overseas by offering extra cash, reimbursement for private education and help finding a job for the spouse. But, experts say, often it’s still not enough.
And the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better because most companies expect to need more expatriates in the future.
The population of retirees, on the other hand, is expected to increase rapidly in size as the Baby Boomers age. Retired workers often are enthusiastic about the prospect of working in a different land. And they don’t have the same family considerations to hold them back, experts say.
“Retirees’ families are grown. They are much more free to do what they want to do without obligations back home,” Quaker’s Nicholas suggests. “They are just in a different stage of their life. It’s easier for them.”
It’s a phenomenon being played out across the country. When GTE Corp. surveyed members of its retiree pool in 1997 about whether they would be interested in an international assignment, about 725 respondents said yes.
In the last several years, GTE has sent about 10 retirees to work in Germany, Argentina, Korea, Spain, Taiwan and Brazil, says Randy MacDonald, GTE’s executive vice president of human resources and administration. But as the marketplace continues to go global, MacDonald expects the number of retiree expatriates to mushroom. “You’re going to see more and more of this,” he predicts.
Besides the retirees’ willingness to go, MacDonald says, they provide an intimate knowledge of the company’s business. That combination is enticing to the company.
“It’s a win-win position for both,” MacDonald says. “Retirees feel good about being called back and having a sense of contribution, but with some end to it. They get to do something perhaps they haven’t done in their career.”
The opportunity to help run a company in a foreign land, while exploring Europe and the U.K. on the weekends, was enough to lure Dennis Johnson and his wife to Belgium, where Ameritech is part owner of Belgacom, the telecommunications firm controlled by the Belgian government.
Johnson, 59, who retired from Ameritech at the end of 1994 and still collects his full pension, is chief operating officer of Belgacom, which has 26,000 employees and is the second-largest company in Belgium.
While Johnson had traveled to Europe for pleasure before, this is his first time working overseas as an expatriate. He accepted the job partly because, with his four sons now grown, he and his wife were ready for an adventure. “It’s been a real love affair,” he says.
Johnson is one of several retirees Ameritech has hired for key overseas positions–partly to keep them away from the competition.
“For the people we’re hiring, if we didn’t hire them to be working for us as retirees, someone else would hire them,” says Sarah Bixler, director of leadership and executive development at Ameritech.
Companies in a variety of industries have come to the same conclusion. Benton Harbor, Mich.-based Whirlpool tapped into its retiree pool in 1995, sending two dozen to Shanghai to staff several startup operations. “It really was critical for us to get those systems up and running as fast as we could. The best way, and the most cost-effective way, was the use of these temporary assignments and particularly retirees,” says Whirlpool spokesman Christopher Wyse.
In fact, half of the startup team members were retired Whirlpool workers, many of whom had specific technical expertise.
Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpillar has been using retirees internationally as consultants and temporary workers “for years,” says spokeswoman Marsha Hausser, noting that the company began expanding internationally in the 1950s. “They have wonderful expertise,” she says.
And Motorola has sent at least one retiree, Paul Noakes of Hoffman Estates, to Malaysia to consult with workers at a plant there on quality-control issues.
