Company success and career satisfaction are indivisible (page 1 of 2)

For the career-minded individual, there are an increasing number of "pressure points" that have short and longer-term implications.

The long-term success of this region is contingent upon getting the right people in place, for company performance is about people and, herein lies the problem. Many individuals do not understand the difference between a career position and job and this error often underscores years of ill-selected roles and dissatisfaction. For the employer, this translates to business under-performance.

If you are serious about your career, long-term growth and satisfaction, then navigating your way through the hiring arena requires planning and an understanding of the manifold combinations of difficulties that you will face. Companies must understand that their success is dependent upon getting the best return on their assets, especially their people assets. Careers and business success are intrinsically bound through a common cause; growth and success.

Both the individual and the company are susceptible to the same external influences and the paradox is that when the company gets it wrong, everyone suffers. If this commonality exists then what can they be? Here are some of the issues:

As the region continues to evolve, it influences demands placed on today's managers often requiring greater resourcefulness and innovation. In the private sector, growth across the region is accelerating at a faster pace than the availability of suitably experienced and professionally competent "home grown talent" that is capable of supporting this expansion. This places the hiring company under pressure to remain competitive and at the same time, to achieve domestic succession policy.

Hiring expatriates as interims who will then be expected to establish operating systems and position the company for growth and expansion may not be good for the company, and it hardly supports personal career aspirations. Regional growth is paradoxical, because the very need to deliver against increasingly controlled conditions and to higher levels of compliance such as WTO and Sarbanes-Oxley, define minimum levels of professionalism. Hiring criteria however, often fails to support this need.

Company performance levels necessary to compete within competitive regional and domestic markets demands that they attract the right calibre staff, especially as leaders and functional heads. If this is so, then why are they getting this wrong?

Change is needed across the whole of the business process, from company form to recruitment and staff retention. One of the major causes of discontent has been a systematic erosion of packages being offered, most recently due to the policy of switching to lower cost base nationalities as the primary factor in selection.

Sometimes, the business environment does not support growth and this can have a direct impact on job satisfaction. In some sectors such as construction, although a burgeoning industry, contractor margins are as low as 3%. This is wafer thin, especially when you consider the exposure this represents to the company. It is quite clear that for an expatriate manager to lead a company within an aggressive arena it will be deemed high risk and therefore a package-premium would be expected.

This sector is at the mercy of spiraling raw material costs, machinery shortages and FOREX exposure. But so too is the new incumbent susceptible to external factors and, these will influence overall satisfaction.

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) reports that Asian offshore reserves are moving away from US$ as the dominant reserve currency and moving towards a currency spread such as the Euro and Swiss Dollar.