The Trailing Spouse Network is an informal community of expat professionals. The purpose of the network is to facilitate communication and collaboration on matters related to business and employment as part of the expat lifestyle.
or
Trailing Spouse Network LinkedIn Group.
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As well as this web site, there are also forum for communications:
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Trailing Spouse Network LinkedIn Group.
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Like many who belong to this network, I’ve been living the expatriate lifestyle for several years and I’ve become increasingly aware of the number of people in the same situation as me; choosing to follow your spouses career around the world. In both government and private sector situations, this can mean moving locations every 2 – 5 years. For the employed person this is stressful enough, but for the spouse and other family members it often means leaving a perfectly good job or small business just to start again in an unfamiliar city, without networks of contacts and the stigma that you may only be there for a few years.
The Latent Resource
What I’ve also come to realize is that the collective Knowledge, Skills and Abilities of these people, coupled with their distributed geographic locations is an asset available to the business community, both large and small in a variety of ways.
There are many thousands of individuals in this situation distributed around the world in major cities from every conceivable background and skill set. Surveys have shown that these people are keen to work in their chosen profession but often settle for lesser positions due to their situations.
The Trailing Spouse Network is an initiative to build a community of professional, technical and creative people find productive and satisfying work, wherever they may find themselves around the world.
The Power of Networking
The problem of spousal employment for expat families has existed for many years. The missing link has been a dynamic community of like-minded professionals that can harness the collective resources of people in this situation.
Several on-line forums currently serve the expatriate and Foreign Service communities on a range of issues, but few, if any focus on employment and work opportunities.
The countless Job Search sites provide opportunities but can be extremely overwhelming and have a sense of ‘needle in a haystack’ when it comes to finding regular work suiting your skills.
Our goal is to create a community where expatriated Business, Technical and Creative Professionals can communicate about global and virtual work opportunities. Some initial objectives are:
- Collective Marketing of services to the broader business community
- Identify and align with local and global business networks
- Establish the Expat’ Professionals Yellow Pages
- Arrange by Skill, Location, availability etc.
- Establish the Global Business Yellow Pages
- Businesses that are receptive to Telework / Virtual assistants and other business and employment opportunities for Trailing Spouses
- Compilation of existing telework resources
- Review and discussion of technologies and resources
- Establish the Global Business Development Network
- Expat’s with Business Development skills that can represent others to identify and develop opportunities in their local regions
- Establish the Technology Solutions Group
- Expat’s that can assist with technology issues related with the Virtual work environment.
The items above are intended to stimulate discussion group activity. We welcome involvement, comment and constructive criticism from anyone in the expat’ community, work at home or mobile professsionals or anyone that feels they can add value to this project or community.
We recognize that we live in a commercial world and nothing happens without dollars. My initial efforts to this project are gratis, advertising revenue and sponsorship are always under discussion but will never compromise the objectives of the community.
What now?
We believe with focussed effort we can build a community that can work together to provide opportunities for all of us. From experience, this initial effort will be rewarded by the fact that the community will be greater that the sum of the parts.
The problem of expat’ spousal employment has been on-going for many years, we are lucky to live in a time of global communication and technology that can solve many problems, but human effort and innovation are required to bring it to fruition.
“Don’t sit in front of the empty fireplace and ask for heat” – Earl Nightingale
Jeff Porter
