What is the value of foreign work experience for young return migrants?
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand the value of foreign work experience for young migrants after their return to the home country labour market and their labour market preferences relative to stayers.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors analyse the labour market integration patterns of young return migrants in Slovakia. After reconstructing the life histories of young people from online CVs, a set of regression models investigates the attractiveness, salary expectations and positions of interest to returnees in comparison to stayers.
Findings
Post-accession foreign work experience increases the attractiveness of job candidates. Foreign work experience changes the expectations of returnees with respect to wages and widens their perspective on the location of future work. In the underperforming labour market, migration experience signals to employers a set of skills that differentiate young returnees from young stayers in a positive way.
Research limitations/implications
While the web data are not representative, it allows the authors to study return migration from a perspective that large representative data sets do not allow.
Social implications
Foreign work experience is, in general, an asset for (re)integration into the home labour market, but the higher salary demands of returnees might hinder the process in a less-skilled segment of the labour market.
Originality/value
Return migration is a relatively underresearched area, and knowledge about the perception of returnees among employers and the labour market preferences of returnees is relatively limited. Another contribution lies in the use of online data to analyse return migration from the perspective of both labour demand and supply.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No. 613256, project STYLE: www.style-research.eu/. The authors would like to thank Profesia.sk for providing us with the data and in particular to Mária Mišečková for data support. Research assistance from Martin Mýtny in cleaning the data set is also acknowledged. The authors would like to thank an anonymous referee for very valuable comments. All errors remain the authors’ own.
Citation
Kureková, L.M. and Žilinčíková, Z. (2018), "What is the value of foreign work experience for young return migrants?", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. 39 No. 1, pp. 71-92. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-04-2016-0091
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited