EU project analyses international labor migration from different perspectives

The European network “Global mobility of employees” offers IAB a unique opportunity to transnationally co-operate with partners from academia, industry, and administration and to jointly train early stage researchers.

The international research project “Global mobility of employees” (GLOMO) will start on 1st of January 2018. The European Commission funds the project for 48 months with a grant from the “excellent science” of Marie Sklodowska-Curie / H2020 Actions funding line. GLOMO is an Innovative Training Network (ITN) and has a total funding of almost four Million Euro. It is coordinated by Professor Maike Andresen from the University of Bamberg in Germany.

Within the action, 15 PhD positions are to be filled which deal with topics on migration and expatriation. Participating partners are Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, Cranfield University in the United Kingdom, Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Germany, Toulouse Business School in France, University of Vaasa in Finland, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Airbus SAS in France. All of those partners are guiding at least one research project. Interested researchers can apply for the positions starting 1st of January 2018. Starting date of the 3 year PhD positions will be 1st of September 2018.

The participating junior researchers will have the opportunity to work with leading scholars in the field of expatriation and migration. They will also receive a comprehensive training. Mobility is not only the theoretical and thematic topic of the action, but it is part of the project itself: All PhD students will be based at a host institution, but will also participate in temporary secondments to research institutes, businesses and governmental institutions.

In this way, GLOMO will build an ambitious and unique network of senior and junior scholars in the field of global mobility. All network partners are engaged in a common topic which is highly relevant theoretically as well as in practice. Thus, the ITN does not only thematically, but also represents through its implementation “lived Europe”. The exchange of ideas and the co-operation in a network across many different cultures, be it national, organisational or research field cultures, is at the heart of GLOMO.

Thus, the ITN offers IAB a unique opportunity to transnationally co-operate with partners from academia, industry, and administration and to jointly train early stage researchers. IAB profits from the fact that the topic “global labour mobility” will be looked at from different points of view. While the European partners bring in the perspectives of businesses and individual migrant workers, IAB will investigate the institutional framework of labour migration.

Here, two aspects will be at the centre of attention. On the one hand, GLOMO will study the economic, social, and legal settings that foster or hamper the international mobility of employees on the national level. On the other hand, GLOMO will analyse how different national educational and vocational training systems regulate the access to the labour market with certificates and the approval (or disapproval) of foreign degrees.

“The network GLOMO does not only intensify the internationalisation of research at IAB. It provides also a great chance to study the mobility of employees in close collaboration with universities, research institutes and businesses from all over Europe”, recaps Silke Anger, Head of Research Department at IAB.