Insights into Expat Life: A Look at the InterNations Member Base

Have you ever wondered what makes the members of our InterNations network “tick”, so to speak? Are you curious about what they do for a living, how long they’ve been staying abroad, and what their future plans are? Now’s your chance to find out!

Over the last few months, our team has conducted a series of surveys to gather customer feedback in order to improve the InterNations experience for our members. Along the way, we have collected a variety of factoids about our member base, which we’d like to share with you.

Reasons for Relocating

The typical InterNations member is in his or her late thirties (the average age is 39), and Mr. or Ms. Expat is very much a highly qualified career guy or career woman. The vast majority of our members has at least a bachelor’s degree, and most of them moved abroad for the sake of their job (56%) or their education (37%).

However, there’s also a vast contingent of people with a definite case of “wanderlust”: Almost one third of survey participants decided to move because they enjoy living abroad.

(If you’re an attentive reader, you may have noticed that the three figures above add up to over 100%. Multiple answers were possible.)

On the Job

So, what do our career-minded expats actually do? While about a quarter of all respondents describe themselves as employees, 30% are in a management position of some kind – with a respectable 8% at the top of the corporate ladder.

16% of our members prefer being their very own boss, though: They are self-employed or successfully run a business.

Of course, we have also found out which sectors and industries are especially popular to work in. InterNations members have a strong affinity for IT and technology. With 12%, this was the most cited response to our question.

Runners up are finance and real estate, as well as education (with 10% and 9%, respectively). In comparison, the utilities sector and agriculture/mining were the two least frequent replies as far as occupation is concerned.

The Expat “Life Cycle”

But InterNations members don’t just live to work. They clearly like life abroad: Nearly 50% of all survey participants belong to the category of “long-term expatriates”. They left their home country two or more years ago; a great many have even been living abroad for five years or longer.

Our community has a significant percentage of local members, too: 18% are currently living in their native country, and 13% identify as “repatriates”, i.e. those who’ve recently come back from a stint abroad.

The local members frequently dream of globe-trotting (again), and about one fifth has concrete plans to move to another country within a year.

All things considered, it hardly comes as a surprise that over 20% of InterNations expats would want to stay abroad forever.

Thanks and Congrats!

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to fill in our questionnaire! We are very grateful for your feedback and will do our best to take all valuable input on board.

In particular, we’ve been told, over and over again, that our members are looking forward to seeing new Local Communities opening all across the world – particularly in emerging countries in Africa and Asia.

Last but not least, we’d like to congratulate the lucky winners of our prize draw. We raffled off five iPads among our respondents.

These prizes go to: Finnish expat Marina in Nice (France); Sophia from Belgium, who’s now living in Lisbon (Portugal); Marcus, a New Zealander in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia); US expatriate Craig Bailey in the Czech Republic, and Vicki, who has exchanged her native Greece for Belgium. Enjoy!

(Image credit: InterNations)