Why More Workers and Employers Are Looking Abroad for Jobs They Can't Find at Home

Surveys show job scarcity, lifestyle concerns, and remote work are driving a growing cross-border search for talent and opportunity.

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Today’s tight U.S. labor market has many workers feeling job opportunities have become an unattainable rarity. At the same time, employers often say they can’t find enough qualified candidates to fill their open positions. One upshot of those contrasting perspectives is that more employees and businesses alike are now looking abroad to meet work needs they can no longer fulfill at home.

Those overlapping yet diverging quests for labor solutions in third-party countries were identified in two recently released business surveys. The first was a study by online language learning platform Preply of 1,500 workers in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. who had already learned a foreign tongue, or have plans to do so soon. A whopping 82 percent of those respondents described themselves as either “open to relocation” to nations where their new linguistic skills could be put to work as employees, or expats who’d already made that professional move.

Just as significantly, Preply found “81 percent of those open to moving abroad say they are more likely to do so now than they were just 24 months ago.” That’s a large and growing mass of employees ready learn another language as a means of getting work where those tongues are workplace linga franca.

“(It) reveals a sharp rise in the number of people seriously considering a move abroad, rather than merely dreaming about it,” a Preply report on the findings said. “Economic pressures, quality of life concerns, and the pursuit of greater stability are the key drivers, with language proficiency serving as a critical enabler.”

Indeed, while it’s easy to assume raging culture wars, political clivages, and increasingly divided societies might be the largest factors in workers moving abroad to live and work, survey respondents more frequently pointed to more pragmatic and professional reasons.

A majority of participants cited recent job losses in their home countries as the biggest consideration for using acquired languages skills to work abroad. Fully 63 percent of Gen Z respondents said the loss of a position in the previous 24 months was their main motive.

Just over a third of all participants, meanwhile, thought a new country and working environment would permit them to make a new and more stable professional start after having stumbled at home. Another 41 percent said the main driver was to find work opportunities abroad that they felt had become too rare or difficult to obtain in their domestic markets.

At the same time, 55 percent of all respondents said they believed their quality of life already had, or would soon improve from a move abroad for work. Another 56 percent of participants also thought they’d find lower costs of living in other countries, benefit from better work-life balance and stronger labor laws, and have access to reliable yet more affordable healthcare systems in new countries.

But there were two other big considerations that expats or people now eyeing a move abroad mentioned.

The first was the increased confidence and belief in their personal and professional abilities that 75 percent of respondents said that learning and using a new language had given them. Reinforcing that sentiment of self-assurance, meanwhile, were the 92 percent of participants who stressed the critical importance that knowing and being capable of effectively using a local language had been in their success in thriving in the foreign countries and workplaces they’d chosen to adopt.