Corporate Relocation: How Companies Send People Abroad — and How to Land One
The job that pays you to move abroad sounds like the easiest way to do the hardest thing. It is — and it isn't. Here is how corporate relocation really works, and the part the package will never cover.
There is a version of moving abroad where someone else handles the visa, pays for the shipping, books the flights, and puts your family in temporary housing while you find your feet. It exists. It is called corporate relocation, and for a certain kind of move it is genuinely the smoothest road there is. People spend years trying to engineer an international life from scratch, when the most direct route is often to be sent.
In our own family, every move has followed one person's work. The job moved, and the rest of us moved with it. So I have seen this from both sides of the table — the partner whose career carries the family across borders, and the partner who follows. Both seats teach you something the brochures don't. Let me walk you through how it actually works, who does it, how to put yourself in the path of it, and the one thing no relocation package has ever solved.
What corporate relocation actually is
"Corporate relocation" is a loose umbrella for any move where an employer sends you to work in another country and helps you get there. Underneath it sit a few different arrangements, and it's worth knowing which one you're being offered, because they are not the same deal.
The classic is the international assignment, or secondment: you stay employed by your home company but are posted to an overseas office for a fixed period, usually one to five years, with the expectation that you'll return or move on to the next posting. Then there's the permanent transfer, where you move countries and become a local employee of the company there, often with a lighter support package because it's treated as a one-time relocation rather than an ongoing assignment. And in some industries — energy, mining, large engineering — there's the rotational model, where you work a block of weeks in-country and a block at home, which is a different life again.
The shorthand most families care about is simpler: is the company moving the job, or moving your life? A secondment moves your whole life and usually pays for it. A localised transfer moves the job and leaves more of the life to you. Read the offer for which one it really is.
Who actually sends people abroad
Not every employer relocates people, and the ones that do tend to cluster in predictable places. If being sent abroad is the goal, it helps to be standing where the moves happen.
The most reliable senders are the big professional-services firms — the large accountancy and consulting networks run formal global-mobility programmes and move staff between offices as a matter of course. Management consultancies do the same. Then there are the globe-spanning industries whose work is simply located in other countries: oil, gas and renewable energy; mining and resources; large-scale engineering, infrastructure and construction. International banks move people between financial hubs. Big consumer-goods and pharmaceutical companies rotate managers through their regional markets. Technology firms relocate specialists to where the work, or the visas, happen to be.
And then there is the world I know best, which most "corporate relocation" articles ignore entirely: the international public and humanitarian sector. The UN agencies, the development banks, the bilateral aid bodies, the large international NGOs, the diplomatic services — these organisations exist to place skilled people in other countries, and they relocate families constantly, often to harder postings with stronger support. If your instinct is to do meaningful work in places that need it, this is a route into the sponsored move that most people never think to consider. It is the one that has carried my own family across four continents.
Why it's so attractive
The appeal is obvious the moment you've ever tried to move countries on your own. Relocating a family privately is expensive, slow and bewildering. A good corporate package takes the most painful, costly parts and simply handles them.
A strong package can include the shipping of your household goods, flights for the whole family, temporary accommodation while you settle, a housing allowance or subsidised rent, and — the one that quietly matters most for families — help with international school fees, which can run to tens of thousands a year per child. There's often a cost-of-living adjustment if you're posted somewhere pricier than home, a hardship or location allowance for tougher postings, and tax support so you're not accidentally taxed twice. The visa and immigration paperwork, the part that terrifies most independent movers, is usually done for you. At its best, you arrive in a new country with the logistics solved and a soft place to land.
Beyond the money, there's the career. International experience is one of the fastest ways to grow — you take on more, you're trusted with more, and the move itself becomes a story that opens doors for years. And there's the plain adventure of it: a life abroad, handed to you with the hardest barriers removed. It is, genuinely, one of the best deals going.
How to land a job that sends you abroad
People imagine the sponsored move arrives as a bolt from the blue. Almost always, it's the result of a few deliberate choices made in the right order. Here is the sequence that actually works.
First, be inside an organisation that moves people. You cannot be seconded by a company that operates in one country. The single biggest predictor of an international posting is simply working for an employer that has them to give — one of the sectors above. If your current employer is purely domestic, that's the thing to change first.
Second, make yourself the obvious person to send. Companies relocate people who solve a problem in the destination — a skill that's scarce there, a project that needs a trusted pair of hands, a market they're trying to build. Become known internally for something specific and transferable, and you turn from "someone who'd like to go" into "the person we should send."
Third, say it out loud. This sounds too simple, but mobility programmes run on knowing who is willing to move. Tell your manager. Register on the internal mobility platform if there is one. Get to know the regional offices. A surprising number of postings go to whoever raised their hand at the right moment, not to whoever looked best on paper.
Fourth, be genuinely flexible — at least once. The first international move is the hardest to get and the easiest to over-negotiate out of existence. Being willing to take a less glamorous posting, or a shorter assignment, to prove you can do it well, is often what unlocks the better moves later. In the development and diplomatic world this is almost a rule: the tougher first posting is the door to the choosier second one.
For the international public sector specifically, the entry path is a little different — relevant qualifications, real field experience, and often a second language matter more than internal politics. But the underlying logic is the same: build the scarce, needed skill, go where you're needed, and the moves follow.
The part no package will ever cover
Here is the honest bit, and it's the reason I do this work at all.
A corporate relocation package is built to move an employee productively. It is not built to move a family well. The company optimises for the person doing the job — that they arrive, settle quickly enough to be useful, and stay. Everything in the package serves that. And it leaves a gap exactly where families feel the move most.
The relocation agent will find you a house and sort your visa. No one will help your children grieve the friends they're leaving, or sequence the first month so the family doesn't quietly come apart in it. And then there is the partner who follows. In most packages, support for the accompanying partner is a token gesture — a CV workshop, a welcome lunch — set against the reality of giving up a career, a community and an identity to make the move possible. As the partner who has followed a job across borders, I can tell you the hardest question is rarely on the relocation checklist at all: in this country, am I even allowed to work? The package never asks it. The family lives or dies by the answer.
This is the gap, and it is not a small one. The package gets the employee to the country. It does almost nothing to help the family actually arrive — to settle, to belong, to build a life on the other side. Those are different problems, and the second one is the one that decides whether the move is a success or a slow ache nobody can quite name.
The move you're sent on is still a move you have to make
None of this is an argument against the sponsored move. If you can engineer one, do — it removes real barriers that stop families dead. Just go in clear-eyed about where the support ends. The company hands you the logistics. It does not hand you the sequence: what to decide first, how to prepare a family rather than a shipment, how to land the first thirty days, how the following partner builds something of their own, how the children find their feet.
That sequence — the human half of the move the package leaves out — is exactly what the Global Relocation System is built to carry, in the right order, so that the parts your employer doesn't cover don't fall through the cracks. If you're at the start of this, or weighing up a posting that's just landed in your inbox, our free relocation resources are a good place to begin — they walk through the early questions, including the ones no relocation package will ever ask you.