The Language
The EU now encompasses a dozen different languages. If you move to an English speaking country like England or Ireland, your adjustment will the easiest. A native English speaker must nonetheless adjust to things like different tax systems and social norms. Non-EU nationals may obtain the right to work in an EU country. The ease of doing so depends on nationality and status and is determined by different agreements and other EU rules.

Background – Are you in IT or Some Sort of Academic Research?
The IT field is in demand and one can find work fairly easily, even without the native language. Many tech positions in Germany and Switzerland require only English.
If one speaks English and has the required competencies, one will have a good chance of finding work in Europe.

If you’re from an academic research background, this also helps. English is usually the international work language for research in academic situations and you can adjust fairly well.

Background – Business an Advantage
More and more companies have English as their company language. If you have a background in business or a related degree, you will have a greater chance of finding employment. However, most often, in Germany, in Switzerland, in France, in Italy, even in Austria or Scandinavia, you will be expected to eventually learn the language. Even if English is the official company language, people do speak the local language and you will need to fit in as well as succeed in the long term in your job. This is likely to be a major challenge, if not the major challenge: learning a language takes time, commitment and discipline.

High Competition
If you are not from an IT, Scientific / Academic, or Business background, and do not have a specialized education, you will encounter very high competition for jobs, even with a mastery of the language.
Europe has many immigrants, and they are competing for the same jobs.

The ‘English Teacher’ Fallback
Many native English speakers think they can rely on being an English teacher as a fallback. This is not really an option, unless you are prepared to live like a student.
Finding decently remunerated work as an English teacher will usually require your having important credentials in this area.

All citizens of the EU, plus Switzerland, have the right to move all around and work anywhere in the European Community that they want. (It’s not too clear what Switzerland had to gain in this arrangement since it has the highest standard of living, so the only Swiss considering leaving Switzerland to seek jobs in the EU are the ones on unemployment.)

However, when an American, Canadian or a New Zealander come to Europe to find work, he has to find an employer that will sponsor his work permit. The first few months while he’s going through that job hunting process, he may have to work “black,” meaning he may have difficulty getting paid because his work and residency in the country have not yet been approved.

Getting a work permit is a constant topic of conversion among the expatriate crowds in Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Zurich, Geneva, Paris, and Barcelona. The exchange of visa horror stories and grand schemes of getting away with overstaying – everyone has a nightmare story of being escorted to the border by the immigration authorities. Some contemplate proposing marriage to the random attractive native they met at a bar the week before, others gave up and return to their home country, and still others persevere and deal with the process and the paperwork.

Acquiring a work permit in Europe is a challenge but a good skill set, perseverance and some personality will help you do the trick.

Dans bien des corps de métiers, on relève un manque de motivation, un sentiment de frustration, de la fatigue, du stress contre-productif, une pression destructrice, etc. Force est de constater que la perte d’initiative et la perte de créativité sont générales, ce qui a des conséquences humaines mais aussi économiques, que cela soit pour l’entreprise ou la société.

Il est grand temps que les cadres dirigeants prennent en compte cette réalité et s’attaquent aux systèmes qui conduisent à de tels gâchis. Il faut remettre de l’envie dans les organisations, donner aux hommes et aux femmes des raisons de « se bouger », de s’impliquer. Le salarié a besoin d’être écouté pour se sentir entendu. Si ce n’est pas par pur philantropie, le jeu en vaut la chandelle d’un point de vue économique car les performances sont bien meilleures quand les employés ont le sentiment d’avoir prise sur leur travail au lieu d’une exécution passive…

Face au développement général du stress et des tensions au travail, les approches traditionnelles de la communication interne sont totalement dépassées. Il ne suffit plus d’avoir de bons outils (intranet, conventions, etc.), il faut d’abord et surtout avoir une vraie stratégie, ce qui , presque partout, fait encore cruellement défaut… Peut-être faut-il commencer par donner une vision, une direction claire à l’enteprise et “l’intendance suivra”, pour reprendre l’expression du brillant général !

Mergers and acquisitions in the European Community are expected to rise 20% over their 2009 levels.

Analysts are watching the takeover attempt of Cadbury by Kraft in the UK for $10.5 billion as a sign of events to come during 2010.

The last data coming from Mergermarket confirms the trend during the Q4 of 2009 toward acquisitions and mergers to grow market share, a key strategic wind shift from mergers of necessity related to the financial crisis to mergers of opportunity to achieve growth.

According to a survey published in December by Boston Consulting Group and UBS, roughly 20% of the managers surveyed indicated that they were planning a major merger operation for 2010. Merger activity is expected to be largest in the United States. More generally, analysts are expecting 2010 to mark the return to a more normal economic environment, using more traditional modes of financing and less risk.

For such consolidations and restructurings to occur, several factors need to be simultaneously present. First, there needs to be a realistic valuation of companies with an adequate balance of profits and reserves and the measure of taste for risk; a climate of confidence needs to return.

In this context, pharmaceutical companies or companies dealing in raw materials, or financial insitutions will be particularly active and an increasingly preponderant role will be played by companies operating in emerging economies.

Analysts also underline that financing of operations will rely on cash or exchange of stock, though the market expects several more months of cheap money during which time companies can finance their operations with cheap loans.

In the present dire economic conditions allow companies and organization to test the mettle of their managers. It’s easy to manage in prosperous times: things practically manage themselves and mistakes are buried in an enterprise’s overall profitability.

But as orders fall, unemployment rises, and the pressure for performance, competence and reactivity rise at private companies, managers must steer through severely troubled waters and their performance will be subjected to much more brutal and unimpeachable scrutiny.

What do you do when demand for your product or service is drying up? How do you cut costs without cutting off your legs ? How do you grow when markets are shrinking ?

For top managers and senior directors and executives, getting through turbulent times is never simple. The common behavior in such situations is to retreat and wait until things improve, but this is often not the best decision in the long run. Often, downturns present excellent opportunities for a companies to re-invent themselves, steal talent from adversaries, and otherwise position themselves for long term prosperity.

In this current downtown, which many are now calling a depression, managers are mainly trying to stop the flow of cash from leaving the building, especially by cutting staff and eliminating unessential jobs, but this strategy carries the risk of damaging the essence of the company and impairing the possibility of future recovery.

Getting rid of the brains who are responsible for actually making your products or producing your services competitive in the first place is bad strategy. PR can be as big an enemy to senior management as the collapse of the economy; management will probably have to invest substantial resources in communicating with their troops. Staff need to see resolution and certainty, which also helps to quell rumors. Business psychologists say that it is much better for employees to know they will be losing their jobs than for them to remain in cloud of uncertainty about it for an extended period of time.

Further, the natural reflex of hunkering down in a crisis and retreating in an attempt to conserve cash can be disastrous for a business – throwing away important partnerships or opportunities or ventures. Things like research and development must continued and producers of all kinds need to consider that cut capacity can be difficult to rapidly re-instate. When the upturn occurs, you will have lost key talent, and hiring it back will be very expensive.

A lot of managers had an easy time from 1997-2007. We are now in a period which will bring talented managers to the fore.

In 2009, 75% of companies in Switzerland have reduced their HR budgets, and lowered expenses related to salaries and personnel.

Responding to the economic slowdown in Switzerland and the uncertainties of markets, companies have lowered their forecasts for salary growth to roughly 2% for 2009. There are overall substantially fewer job vacancies on the employment market and fewer professionals are electing to change jobs in the current economic climate.

Currently, according to recent surveys, approximately 35% of companies believe their business will shrink in 2009, while another 35% think that their business will remain at the same level; about 20% expect an increase in their sales revenues for 2009.

To reduce budgets allotted to personnel, companies are counting on a variety of measures. First, 50% of employers are planning to reduce hiring or in some cases to fire staff. In order not to lose the talents and knowledge base of colleagues in place they prefer to act primarily on new recruitment rather than to let go existing staff; two-thirds of companies have instituted hiring freezes over the next 6 – 12 months.

Other steps being taken by companies include reducing the variable portions salaries, such as bonuses. Approximately one-third of companies forecast reductions for all employees, slightly less than a third forecast reductions for managers.

About a third of companies will reduce the number of promotions and 20% will push a few months into the future decisions on salaries, which will leave time to examine how the economic situation evolves.

Already many multinationals have announced cost cutting steps to their employees. At the same time, independent HR consultancies note that top companies are reserving considerable funds in the form of special budgets to compensate and retain their top talent and particularly performant staff.

In the current troubled economic climate, HR departments feel themselves under attack: more than 90% of big companies report forecasting reductions for their HR departments in 2009 and about a third are planning to cut HR staff. The reductions are symptomatic of a general shrinkage in recruitment resulting in fewer job opportunities, fewer companies at recruitment fairs and fewer opportunities for graduating students and professionals at the start of their careers, and greater uncertainty in the employment market.

Many companies whose business is recruitment are shifting some of the business activity to coaching, staff development, or outplacement services for their corporate clients.

The conventional local wisdom is, “Switzerland is not an island.” In spite of dim memories of the Golden Age in the not-too-distant past when foreign nationals were accorded work permits for Switzerland on a case-by-case basis, and unemployment was less than 0.2% (Switzerland, like the United States, carefully selected its foreign population by educational and professional criteria) the current Zeitgeist– proclaimed throughout official channels and their surrogate establishment media– is that Switzerland must be another supermarket in a world full of supermarkets.

There are few voices in Switzerland at this time that imagine Switzerland as a boutique, rather than a supermarket. While a boutique sells high value-added goods and services and leverages its intellectual property and ‘brand,’ the supermarket competes essentially on price. As such, it is entirely subject to the mercurial winds of global price competition, and the inexorable reality that a Chinese laborer earning $1 / day will force you to lower your standard of living before his living standard rises to meet yours.

The global recession, like all economic trends, fads, and social tendencies, has taken its time to arrive in Switzerland. It’s rare that something starts in Switzerland –we are a risk-averse nation, that prefer mimicry to originality—but everything eventually ends up here. (The Author will wager that even Guantanamo’s inmates will end up here!)

So it is that the recession – soon to become depression—has arrived. We shouldn’t be surprised. After the theft of $65 billion of public funds to (temporarily) rescue a private institution that should simply have been nationalized, the amount of resources available to confront the tsunami about to wash over us is limited.

According to a report from the International Labor Organization (ILO), the unfolding economic crisis may cause the number of unemployed across the globe to rise to over 50 million if the situation continues to deteriorate. Luckily, employees of the ILO need not fear for their public sector sinecures, and may even hire additional staff to grapple with the increased workload of reports as the situation worsens.

In Switzerland, the effects of the global economic crisis on the Swiss employment market have begun to be strongly felt. Already last December, to avoid layoffs, numerous companies announced measures of unpaid leave – partial unemployment through reduced working hours rather than firing staff.

But in January, the first wave of layoffs began. Swissmetal laid off 35 workers, Allianz Suisse 250, Ebel and Zenith 50, Girard-Perregaux 22, GF Charmilles 180, and the list has promised to grow long, and well into 2010, according to the SECO (the federal secretariat for the Economy), which predicts a rise in unemployment of at least 0.7% this year and another 1% in 2010.

Despite this less than rosy assessment (analysts outside the government claim the SECO statistics are unrealistically low) of a degenerating domestic economy, the Swiss federal government remains ferociously in favor of the bilateral agreements with the EU, permitting anyone in the European Community to come work in Switzerland. In exchange, we Swiss residents obtain the dubious privilege of being able to go work in the much less-well-paid, less environmentally sound, less safe, and more bureaucratic European Community.

Professor Yves Flückiger of the University Employment Observatory argues that Switzerland will be strongly affected by the global recession because of it’s reliance on exports (about 50%). As an example, the violent fall of orders in the automobile sector has had a powerful impact on some Swiss exporters in the equipment manufacturing sectors and spare parts industries. The German cantons will necessarily be more heavily affected because they are more oriented toward manufacturing exports to the United States. Swissmem is already predicting a loss of 25,000 jobs in 2009 in the machine industries, electrical equipment and metals.

The monoculture of the economic philosophy of global free trade and the parallel misguided application of a ‘supermarket’ business model will render significant portions of the Swiss economy vulnerable to major perturbations and mass layoffs. These segments of the economy are further affected by the rise in the Swiss Franc against the dollar and the euro. The segments of the economy which conform more to a ‘boutique’ model – such as high tech and luxury—should prove to be more resistant. Biotech, pharmaceuticals, and high technology sectors are still thriving.

Analysts are expecting waves of layoffs in the banking and financial sectors, and in the insurance industries. The layoffs, however, will not be general to the sectors. Among the banks, while UBS and Credit Suisse are suffering, the Swiss cantonal banks are thriving, smothered under huge influxes of new cash from customers fleeing larger and potentially insolvent institutions. Many of the cantonal banks are vigorously hiring.

The luxury watch industries are also complaining about diminishing exports, but the suffering is mainly among the moderately priced products.

Other sectors expected to be hit strongly by the slowdown : the media sector, the telecommunications sector, tourism, and the construction industry.