Global career in the making: Social construction of skill among migrant IT professionals in Japan

• In Event: 20862 - Section on International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Migration Experiences in East Asia

Abstract

Despite recent advancements in our understanding of skilled migration, missing from extant conceptualizations is the influence of varying organizational contexts on migrant professionals’ skill development and career trajectories in the host country. In theorizing the role of organizational context in mediating institutional factors of a host country and individual career strategies of migrant professionals, we draw on in-depth interviews with 63 Korean IT professionals who developed their careers in Japan. Our analysis of their career narratives led us to uncover three types of accounts regarding how migrant IT professionals in Japan make sense of the development and utilization of skill in relation to Japanese-style HRM: selective embedding, constrained dis-embedding, and entrepreneurial re-embedding. Furthermore, we demonstrate how each account relates to varying degrees of globalization of their employing organizations. Integrating these findings with previous research, we offer a process model that illustrates how the interplay between skill and organizational practices triggers and influences the career decisions of skilled migrants, thus shaping their journey to be a ‘global talent’

Authors

• Sung-Chul Noh, Hitotsubashi University

• Ilju Kim, Sophia University