Making their own way: international experience through self-initiated foreign assignments

Studies of international transferees have generally assumed that they are sent to a foreign country by their employer. In practice, many of these transferees make their own arrangements to get work abroad and this paper presents new information on this largely unstudied group, drawn from graduate engineers from Finland. It identifies similarities with the more traditional expatriate forms and some important differences. It goes on to suggest that this group of employees is itself composed of identifiable subgroups that have different characteristics.