Chapter 17: Developing an International Workforce

Discussion of international human resource development (IHRD) in multinational corporations (MNCs) has largely focused on two important international workforce types: ‘expatriate’ and ‘inpatriate’. The international workforce has a critical role in the success of the global market, and developing their skills and competencies has been the subject of extensive research (Short and Anderson, 2021). Many IHRD focus on learning and development (L&D) programmes designed to prepare expatriates to successfully compete and survive in international assignments (Conrad and Meyer-Ohle, 2019). Workers nowadays are expected to take more responsibility for developing their knowledge and skills to meet current and future job needs (Nachmias and Hubschmid-Vierheilig, 2021). Thus, the HRD literature devoted a great effort to understanding individual differences, self-regulated learning and advances in the ways that HRD scholars can track the training on a broad array of learning outcomes (Alhejji et al., 2016).