Off the Record: The Generation That's Making Us Rethink Everything

Welcome to Off the Record, where members of our Expat Academy community share their unfiltered thoughts on the topics everyone's thinking about but not always saying out loud.

We lost another one last week.

High-potential employee, exactly the profile leadership loves: ambitious, capable, multilingual. We'd identified her for a developmental assignment to our regional hub. Eighteen months, great exposure, clear path to a senior role afterwards. The kind of opportunity that, ten years ago, people would have jumped at.

She turned it down. Not because of the location, not because of the compensation, not because of family circumstances. She turned it down because, in her words, "I don't see why I need to move countries to develop my career. I can do impactful work from where I am."

And here's the uncomfortable part: she's not entirely wrong.

If you work in Global Mobility and you haven't had this conversation yet, you will. Gen Z is fundamentally questioning assumptions that our entire profession has been built on. The assumption that international experience is inherently valuable. The assumption that physical presence matters more than output. The assumption that disrupting your life for the company is a reasonable career investment.

They're not buying it. And honestly, after the past few years, can we blame them?

I've heard the dismissive takes. "They're entitled." "They don't understand how the real world works." But this feels different. This isn't about work ethic or ambition. This is about a fundamental reassessment of what work should cost us personally.

Gen Z grew up with technology that made distance irrelevant. They watched the pandemic prove that many jobs genuinely don't require physical presence. They saw their parents or family members get made redundant after decades of loyalty. Now we're asking them to relocate for roles they can see being done remotely by others, in cities with housing crises they can't afford, whilst simultaneously promoting people who never left headquarters.

The maths isn't mathing, as they'd say.

Here's what keeps me up at night. What if they're right? What if we've been overselling the value of international assignments? Not because the experience isn't valuable (it absolutely can be) but because we've treated it as universally essential when it's actually situationally beneficial.

I've seen brilliant global leaders who never took a traditional expat assignment. I've seen mediocre ones who did three. The assignment itself isn't magic. The learning, the relationships, the perspective: those things are magic, but increasingly, there are other ways to get them.

Some of our traditional models are genuinely broken for this generation. The long-term assignment that assumes someone will pause their partner's career and uproot their life for two to three years worked when single-income households were the norm. Now we're asking dual-career couples to sacrifice one income and calling it a "development opportunity." 

So what do we do?

We can keep trying to force-fit our existing models and watch acceptance rates decline. We can keep talking about how international assignments are "critical for development" whilst wondering why fewer people believe us. Or we can actually listen.

Perhaps the future isn't about abandoning international assignments but about being far more intentional about when and why we use them. Shorter, more frequent rotations instead of multi-year relocations. Project-based international work that doesn't require full relocation. Virtual global teams with periodic in-person collaboration.

 I've been pushing our organisation to develop a proper virtual assignment policy for months now. The pushback is always the same. "How do we define it?" "What about tax implications?" "Immigration won't allow it." All valid concerns, certainly, but also convenient excuses to avoid adapting.

The reality is that people are already doing the work across borders without relocating. They're managing teams in different time zones, leading regional projects, building client relationships internationally. We just haven't formalised the framework to support it properly. Instead, we're stuck in this grey area where the work is happening but the policies haven't caught up, leaving both employees and GM teams navigating a compliance minefield.

Virtual assignments aren't perfect. They don't replicate full immersion. But they might be exactly what this generation needs: the international exposure and cross-border experience without the life disruption. The cultural learning and global perspective without uprooting a partner's career. The flexibility to work globally whilst maintaining personal stability.

Yet we're dragging our feet. Perhaps because acknowledging that virtual assignments can deliver value feels like admitting that traditional relocations aren't always necessary. Perhaps because it's genuinely complex to operationalise. Perhaps because we're simply too invested in the models we've always used.

It might be about unbundling what we actually value about international experience (cultural fluency, global perspective, cross-border collaboration) and finding multiple pathways to develop those capabilities, of which traditional assignments are one option, not the only option.

I'm not naïve. Some roles genuinely require physical presence. Some learning genuinely happens through immersion. But if we're honest, that's not every assignment we're running. Some of them are running on inertia, on "this is how we've always developed leaders," on box-ticking rather than genuine strategic need.

Gen Z is forcing us to justify our models in a way we haven't had to before. When you actually interrogate some of these assumptions, they don't hold up as well as we'd like to think.

The members of this generation who do choose international assignments are often doing it for the experience itself: the adventure, the cultural immersion. Not because HR said it's necessary for promotion, but because they genuinely value it. In some ways, that's actually better. Those assignees are more engaged, more curious, more likely to make the most of the experience.

We're going to need to evolve. Not because Gen Z is difficult, but because the world has changed and our models haven't kept pace. The companies that figure out how to develop global leaders without requiring everyone to follow the same relocation playbook will win the talent war.

I don't have all the answers. But I know that dismissing an entire generation as "not getting it" is considerably less productive than asking ourselves whether we're the ones who might need to get it.

The revolution isn't coming. It's already here. And it's happening one declined assignment offer at a time.