Lost Wisdom: Capturing Expatriate Knowledge

Edwina R. Haring, Ph.D., Principal, Dynamic Performance

by Article written by Marie Payne, Delaware Tech Student

This workshop focused on helping organizations capture wisdom that is gained through expatriation. Companies spend thousands of dollars investing in a foreign assignment in which a high level executive is assigned to a company in another country. They do this because they have an international interest of investments and also want to benefit from the experience in order to expand knowledge in the existing company. But, organizations are finding is that the knowledge gained while on the assignment is getting lost and the company is not benefiting from the expatriate assignment. Thousands of dollars are being wasted and the high level executives are even sometimes discouraged when they return and no one seems to be interested in the knowledge that they have gained and sometimes they even get so discouraged that they end up leaving the company.

Repatriation is when the high level executive return to the United States. The company has the responsibility to make sure they are acclimated back into the United States with a smooth transition for the worker and his family. However, again there are many problems with this, because everyone usually gets out of touch with that person while they are out of the country, so when he or she returns they are like strangers and therefore are excluded from many ongoing procedures and so on. There are several reasons that it is essential to capture the knowledge.