THE INCREASINGLY global nature of the working environment is making it more and more difficult for companies to confine their business within national boundaries.
Small indigenous companies may be able to survive on the profits generated by one marketplace. However, multinationals operating here or Irish companies intent on growing in size have to do business on a much broader scale which demands a particular set of management skills.
What seems clear is that the days of the single focus manager are numbered. The managers of today need to be much more rounded, with strong professional qualifications supported by a good understanding of general business practice. The pattern of their work experience is also important increasingly, this assumes time spent abroad, particularly for those interested in progressing a career within an international organisation.
Some Irish companies are very good at creating "experience gathering" opportunities for their staff at their home bases. But there is only a handful of Irish owned companies with the size and spread of business to give potential managers the breadth of management training they now need to manage effectively in a translational environment.
This is not only a matter of business acumen. It is also about becoming familiar with different corporate "cultures".
"Increasingly when we are putting people into senior roles their suitability is determined as much about their ability to fit culturally into an organisation as it is about their qualifications and experience," says Karl Croke, a partner with the Irish arm of the international executive search company, Amrop.
"This means understanding the complexities of how international business operates, and more particularly how different companies posit ion themselves within this framework. This requires exposure to an international environment and we find that most of the people, being selected for senior jobs have a combination of home and overseas experience and a multi-company background."
Croke acknowledges that building up such experience means moving, around which would seem to run, contrary to the received wisdom about staying put for a "respectable" length of time.
"I think it is quite acceptable for anyone building a career path to stay two years in a position and then to move," he says. "What really matters is the individuals' ability to do a job, and the focus should be on developing the skills needed to achieve a career goal. This may mean moving out to move up," he says.
THIS GROWING NEED for overseas experience is not confined to the commercial sector. Ann Scroope is a museum designer who studied industrial design at the
NCAD before taking up a postgraduate scholarship with Kilkenny Design.
Recently returned from Britain, she was responsible for the design of the new exhibition at Kilmainham Jail in Dublin she says she had no option but to move abroad to gain experience in her chosen field.
"Initially I went to Australia and worked with a company that gave me a lot of training and set me up in my field in a way I could never have achieved at home," she says.
"The experience was fantastic mainly because the Australians have a very progressive attitude to the concept of museums and their relationship to education and it gave me points of reference from which to develop my ideas.
"I also spent time in Scotland and then in London, which was tough but good formative experience in terms of learning how to run and administer projects. So by the time I came home to do the Kilmainham project I had pretty clear ideas about the kind of museum design which interested me and how to go about it."
Scroope is now in the throes of setting up her own museum design business and she feels confident about finding a niche here. "I'm delighted to have had the opportunity to work abroad. But equally I've enjoyed working at home. The calibre of people here is superb from architects and designers to craftsmen and I've found people genuinely interested in my approach, so it has been a very stimulating and exciting time," she says.
I WOULD definitely encourage people to seek work experience abroad, particularly if they ever intend working for multinational companies," says Bill Hennessy, managing partner of human resources consultants MERC.
"Increasingly we are finding that people need to have broader business skills than specific function capability," he says. "For example, a human resources professional also needs to be au fait with the responsibilities and demands faced by other function heads if he or she is to make a meaningful strategic input into their human resources needs.
"Of course it is possible to move up through the ranks without overseas experience," Hennessy adds. "But those with good international exposure do have the advantage, particularly where the focus of their organisation is abroad as is increasingly the case."
