What Are The Most Popular Jobs For Expats?

The world’s expat population continues to grow, even at a time when communications technology has made face-to-face meetings and working in the same office less important.  But what fields are these new expats working in? Data drawn from the job site Jobbatical from 2018 seems to point to just a few fields that make up a majority of this growth.

Note that because of how “expats” are defined and how some industries place their openings or hire their people, certain fields such as construction, security, and shipping may not be represented.

Development

39% of the expats placed through Jobbatical ended up working in development jobs, which is not surprising given the state of the world’s booming online economy and our immense appetite for new apps.  Startups today often need to address a larger pool of issues compared to previous generations, so it isn’t surprising that many are opting to hire larger teams. The destinations are quite varied too, ranging from Singapore to Estonia.

Design

In the past generation, the need to humanize different products, websites, and tech has driven the demand for those with proven design skills. Those with proven design chops can expect to have their skills recognized and compensated especially well in the Middle-east, East Asia, and other regions with booming tech industries.

Marketing/ Public Relations

Marketing jobs and PR jobs have long been somewhat international in nature, and they remain viable fields for expats today. SEO, SEM, and other technical marketing disciplines are also in demand, which has resulted in large numbers of marketers with SEO and SEM experience migrating to tech hubs all over the world.

Product management

The increasing sophistication and requirements of online stores often demand that product managers be available onsite. Product managers are needed to help solve different issues with regards to ever-expanding product lines and categories that have come to typify the online store experiences. However, many countries lack enough people who know how to make those sites work.

With so many different businesses in different countries developing their own localized online stores serving specific demographics, it’s a safe bet that product managers will continue to be in demand in the foreseeable future.

Data science

While most businesses today are now quite capable of incredible data-gathering capabilities, many organizations still lag behind in their ability to make sense out of that data. More and more, the task of removing the difficulties of managing and interpreting all this data is likely to fall to specialized data scientists. Data scientists are expected to be knowledgeable in a number of coding languages, artificial intelligence, psychology, and data visualization, among others.

As more businesses start to realize the need for data science, it’s likely that the demand for this discipline will continue to grow, and more developers will market their skill sets as those of data scientists.

Sales
Every new product needs a sales team behind it to deliver it to the customer. Now that sales and marketing are now understood to be different and highly specialized roles in more countries, more professionals with specific sales experience are finding themselves in foreign postings.

Management

As always, you have to go global if you want to have the best management teams. This has been the case for a while and it’s likely management teams will continue to become more and more diverse as time goes on.If you’re planning to take a job posting abroad, be sure to invest in expat health insurance. Your regular insurance policy may not necessarily follow you to your new job and travel insurance may not adequately cover the risks you might expect as a working expat. Be sure to consider specialized insurers like Now Health International to get better coverage while you work abroad.

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