Corporate growth and personal growth – does your employer brand have a passport?

Through a sporting lens, the issue of country, of allegiance, of belonging have been very much to the fore this week. Four English football sides have represented the Premier League in Europe over the last few days. Of the four starting XIs, just 11 were Englishmen. National hero/pariah – delete as you see fit – Kevin Pietersen, returns to the England cricket team this week in their tour of India, following a brief spell in the wilderness as a result of criticising his captain via text. Born in South Africa, Pietersen joins up with fellow ‘countrymen’ Matt Prior, Jonathan Trott and Craig Kieswetter (Saffers to a man) in the England side. Meanwhile, the English rugby side is about to embark on their autumn internationals, with individuals such as Manu Tuilagi (Samoa), Dylan Hartley (NZ), Mouritz Botha (SA) and Brad Barritt (SA), lending their considerable weight to the cause. So just how much of a factor is national identity and geography today? In the context of an organisation’s employer brand, we would suggest a very relevant one.

The last two editions of the Economist have provided some diverse subject matter to support this theme. Last week, the magazine produced the memorable quote, ‘The world’s most valuable resource is talent. No country grows enough of it’. This week, the same publication carried the story of how talented immigrants are finding the UK an increasingly less welcoming environment for their skills – and last month’s forced rescinding by London Met University of degree course offers to overseas students only cemented this view. The annual allocation of UK work visas is both shrinking and rather neglected – of the 1,000 available for people of exceptional talent last year, just 37 were granted.

And if the UK is increasingly (and worryingly) closing its doors on talented professionals from overseas, much of UK plc’s profit investment is being applied in a one-way direction too. Over the last five years to June 2012, according to Citigroup, £290bn of financial surplus (ie. the great majority of the total) from the UK corporate sector has moved abroad in the shape of bank deposits and foreign investment. Clearly those organisations feel their money is better invested not in domestic markets and operations but in faster growing overseas markets. This has a major bearing not only on UK employment (or unemployment) but also on UK career development and, by definition, the employer brand of many UK organisations.

And who can blame them? According to HSBC, 3bn people or 40% of the global population will join the middle classes – with all the increase in consumer spending that brings with it – by 2050. Virtually all of them will come from countries now considered emerging markets. By 2050, it is very clear they will have emerged. Developing markets comprise just one third of total global consumption today; by 2050, this figure will be two thirds.

Much like itinerant sports professionals, both talent and opportunity are increasingly borderless. The UK is both reaching out – in terms of the investments its major corporates are making – and welcoming in – hi tech firms rather than hi tech talent. This is the environment employees find themselves in – learning opportunities are increasingly to be found outside the UK and those organisations unable to offer talent the chance to grow, to learn, to develop, either through exposure to great management, embracing great technology or through access to great international assignments, may find themselves facing the plight of another once great UK institution. The makers of London’s iconic black cabs, Manganese Bronze Holdings, went into administration this week.