We will soon be conducting a similar survey in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries in Australia and New Zealand, and also with hospital executives throughout South-East Asia.

Will be interesting to see what similarities and differences exist.

Stay tuned for further updates.

While some of our Commonwealth Games participants are showing a reluctance to travel, many other professional Aussies are showing no such reservation in making a career move overseas.

Sure, the world is “getting smaller’’ so the cliché goes, meaning the IT/communications explosion and cheaper travel options enable more international opportunity in many aspects of our lives.

At Ccentric Group, we also notice something more at play in the workforce.  Perhaps a real Aussie spirit of adventure has taken hold because we have clearly seen a distinct upturn in the number of Australians – especially in our areas of specialist executive search in the health and education sectors – casting a career eye overseas.

Local talent such as Robert Wise heads up Spire Healthcare, a major UK private hospital group, Shane Solomon has been CEO of the Hong Kong Hospital Authority, and John Duke is COO of the Bangkok Hospital Medical Centre, part of the largest hospital group in Thailand. In addition, many Aussies are working in the Middle East, Russell Bateman, George Jepson, and Pam Robinson to name a few.

While the challenge of new interstate or regional positions is still great for many candidates, there is undoubtedly a trend among a number of professions to seek positions overseas.

Ccentric Group is currently recruiting for several positions overseas, in locations such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore and recently even in Irian Jaya.

So is there such a factor in the executive search business as the Aussie adventurer?

Australians have been persistent travellers for many decades now. In the 1950s, young Aussies started the long haul to post-war London – when England was considered far more favourably as our mother country.

Students often travelled oh-so-slowly by sea, including merchant ships and relatively primitive commercial cruise ships.

Later, as the jet age allowed more frequent and financially feasible flights to the UK, the number of Aussies flocking to London assumed Bazza McKenzie plague-like proportions in Earl’s Court and surrounding suburbs throughout the early and late ‘60s. Some stayed for ever, some went home broke, others looked at temporary post-tertiary careers in the UK in their chosen profession.

Again, as European immigrants established families and permanent roots in Australia, so the frequency of trips back to their respective mother countries such as Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia increased.

Now with established generations from all corners of the globe and properly acknowledged as one of the worlds’ multi-cultural success stories, it’s all the more natural for Australians to travel for family and tourism reasons.

But for career reasons? It’s too early perhaps to quantify – all we can really do is highlight what we see is a positive trend for our professional workforce.

A well-educated, experienced, willing and mobile Australian professional workforce is a diplomatic and economic win-win situation as our executives take on senior management roles and succeed in different societies and complex workplaces.

There is no better way to display our national confidence and competence than by assuming such leadership roles in business, public service and academia overseas.

Of course, for the individual, the sense of personal adventure is too good to ignore sometimes.  Perhaps it’s the growing homogeneity of many Australian cities and towns that makes an opportunity in an entirely different cultural hub all the more exciting.

No matter what the reason, it’s reached the stage where our professionals overseas are doing as good a job as any of our sportsmen and women in projecting a positive image for our country, often in locations where our sporting presence is negligible.

And it’s without doubt a comfortable, confident and capable Australian reality that is now on view via our OS professionals.