The Transferability Paradox: Skills, Borders and the C Suite Dilemma

We often speak of professional skills as though they were assets that can be packed into a suitcase and carried effortlessly across borders. In reality, skills do not all travel in the same way. A computer language remains a computer language whether one works in Pakistan, Singapore, the United Kingdom or the United States. Engineering principles, mathematics, manufacturing techniques and many scientific disciplines retain much of their relevance regardless of geography. The environment may change, but the fundamental language of the profession remains largely intact.

The situation becomes more complicated with professions that operate within national regulatory and institutional frameworks. Accounting principles may be broadly understood internationally, but taxation, reporting requirements and corporate regulations can differ substantially between jurisdictions. The same is true of law and medicine. A lawyer who has spent decades mastering one country’s legal system cannot simply assume that the same statutes, procedures and precedents apply elsewhere. A doctor may possess years of clinical experience yet still be required to pass examinations and satisfy licensing requirements before being permitted to practise in another country. The knowledge has not disappeared. What has changed is the framework within which that knowledge is recognised and allowed to operate.

This distinction is important because we sometimes confuse the transferability of skills with the transferability of credentials. They are not the same thing. A seasoned CFO does not forget how to evaluate risk, allocate capital, establish financial controls or understand a balance sheet upon crossing an international border. A doctor does not lose diagnostic ability at immigration, nor does a lawyer suddenly lose the capacity for legal reasoning. Yet the receiving country’s institutions may place conditions on recognising those abilities. What is being restricted is often not the skill itself, but the right, opportunity or credibility required to exercise it.

For C suite professionals, however, there is another layer to the problem. As people rise through organisations, their professional value increasingly consists of much more than technical competence. Over twenty or thirty years, an executive accumulates reputation, relationships, cultural understanding, institutional knowledge and credibility. He or she learns how decisions are actually made, which relationships matter, how regulators think, how capital moves and how to navigate the unwritten rules of a particular business environment. This social and institutional capital can become as important as the technical skills that originally built the career.

Crossing a border can dramatically alter the value of that accumulated capital. A CEO, CFO or senior executive who is well known and respected in one country may arrive in another market where few people recognise the organisations he or she worked for, understand the scale of previous responsibilities or appreciate the complexity of the environment in which those responsibilities were exercised. The person has not become less capable, but the ecosystem that validated that capability has been left behind.

This is perhaps one of the least discussed dilemmas of international mobility at senior levels. The higher one climbs within a particular ecosystem, the more deeply one’s professional identity may become connected with that ecosystem. A young engineer may be assessed largely on technical competence and therefore move relatively easily between markets. A senior executive is assessed on a much broader collection of attributes, many of which are difficult to demonstrate on a CV. Reputation, networks, judgement and influence cannot always be exported as easily as qualifications.

Then there is the uncomfortable issue of regional bias. Professional experience is not always evaluated purely on merit. Employers and institutions can consciously or unconsciously attach different values to experience depending on where it was acquired. A senior position in one part of the world may not automatically be regarded as equivalent to a similar position in another. Accent, nationality, familiarity with local business culture and perceptions about the sophistication of the previous market can all affect how a professional is judged. Regulation can create a formal wall, while perception can create an invisible one.

Perhaps professional capital should therefore be thought of in three forms. There is skill capital, meaning what a person actually knows and can do. There is credential capital, meaning what institutions formally recognise or permit that person to do. Finally, there is social capital, meaning the network of people and institutions that know, trust and are prepared to place responsibility in that person’s hands. Skill capital can often travel. Credential capital may require rebuilding. Social capital can sometimes have to be recreated almost from the beginning.

This brings me to the question that I find much harder to answer. If a country’s most capable professionals conclude that their talents will produce greater opportunities elsewhere, should they leave? Or should they remain and use their abilities, experience and influence to improve the environment that is encouraging them to leave in the first place?

There is an obvious argument for mobility. A professional has a responsibility to his or her own life and family and cannot reasonably be expected to sacrifice decades waiting for institutions to improve. Talent naturally seeks environments where it can grow, where merit is recognised and where opportunities allow ability to compound. If those conditions exist elsewhere, moving may be entirely rational.

Yet there is an equally uncomfortable consequence. When capable professionals, entrepreneurs, academics and executives continually leave weaker institutional environments for stronger ones, the countries they leave behind lose precisely the human capital that might have helped strengthen those institutions. Weak systems cause talent to leave, and the departure of talent can make those systems even harder to improve.

We then arrive at something resembling the old question of the chicken and the egg. Do strong institutions create successful people, or do successful people create strong institutions? Do countries first need better systems to retain talent, or must talented people remain long enough to build those systems? If everyone waits for the environment to improve before contributing to it, who creates the improvement? But if individuals spend their lives fighting systems that are resistant to change, what happens to their own potential?

Perhaps the choice is not as binary as it initially appears. Leaving one’s country does not necessarily mean abandoning it. Professionals can move abroad, acquire knowledge, capital, networks and exposure to stronger institutions, and later transmit some of those advantages back through investment, mentoring, entrepreneurship, professional collaboration or eventually returning home. History offers many examples of countries benefiting not only from the people who stayed, but also from those who left, learned elsewhere and remained connected.

There is also a linguistic irony hidden inside the question. Should I change my country, meaning contribute towards transforming the place where I was born, or should I change my country, meaning move somewhere else? The words are identical. The consequences could hardly be more different.

Perhaps neither choice is inherently courageous or selfish. Staying does not automatically make someone a nation builder, just as leaving does not automatically make someone disloyal. Much depends on what a person is capable of accomplishing from either position. Sometimes staying may provide the influence required to create change. Sometimes leaving may provide the knowledge, independence and resources that eventually make a greater contribution possible.

So perhaps the question I should be asking is not whether one person can single handedly change the fate of a country. That may place an impossible burden on any individual. A more useful question might be: Where can my abilities compound most effectively, and from that position, what can I realistically change for myself, my family, my profession and perhaps eventually my country?

I am still looking for the answer. Perhaps there is no universal one. Every professional, particularly those who have spent decades building careers within a particular institutional environment, will calculate the equation differently. But as skills, capital and people become increasingly mobile while recognition, regulation and belonging remain stubbornly local, it is a dilemma that more senior professionals will eventually have to confront.

And perhaps that is why the chicken and the egg are still arguing.

Syed Muhammad Ijaz, FCA (ICAP), ACA (ICAEW), LL.B., is a distinguished financial and legal expert with a comprehensive educational background and over 25 years of professional excellence. A Fellow Chartered Accountant (ICAP) and Advocate of the High Court, Ijaz also holds the ACA designation from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) and an LL.B. degree, enhancing his multifaceted expertise in finance, tax, and corporate laws.