Introduction

Transnational professional spaces are shaped by several key actors: governments, employers, relevant professional bodies and the transnational professionals themselves. Such spaces are created as labour market pressures motivate governments to modify immigration and selection policies to target needed foreign professionals with relevant qualifications and experience. Employers advertise widely to fill critical skills shortages and, at times, actively recruit in foreign markets. Professionals respond to these signals and pursue opportunities in foreign jurisdictions, and professional bodies are confronted with the pressures and politics of recognising and accrediting the qualifications, skills and professional experience of foreigners aspiring to enter the local labour market (Boyd, 2013; Hussein, 2014; Koumenta et al, 2014). All the actors in such a transnational professional space might reasonably be expected to embody a level of intentionality. It would be naive, after all, for an actor (whether employer or prospective employee) to enter the transnational arena without recognising and appreciating significant differences in the cultural, legal and political contexts in which a given profession is embedded in far-flung foreign fields, and the implications of these for day-to-day practice. The risks posed by such naivety are significant: the non-recognition of qualifications, the mismatch of skills and roles, the underutilisation of imported expertise, discrimination against culturally diverse workers, and labour market churn all work against the realisation of the benefits of skilled migration (Hugo, 2014). Thus, a key element of our analysis of Australian social work as a transnational professional space concerns the preparedness with which the relevant actors – the transnational social workers (TSWs) themselves, their employers, the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) and government policymakers – operate in respect of fitting professionals with overseas qualifications and experience into Australian social work practice.

This chapter reports on an exploratory study undertaken in 2014–15 to investigate the experiences of transnationally mobile social workers in Australia, and to assess the preparedness, or naivety, of the various actors in this increasingly transnational environment. Social work is not alone in engaging with significant transnational labour market mobility: similar dynamics have been explored by others in nursing and other medical professions (Martineau and Willetts, 2006; Humphries et al, 2012; Boese et al, 2013), teaching (Han, 2004; Bense, 2014), and higher education (Pherali, 2012).