Re-Pats and the Outsourcing of HR

A friend here runs a placement agency. She called and suggested I apply for a Midwife Educator job here offered by an NGO connected with The Johns Hopkins University in the States. I laughed and explained that I don’t even know how to spell “midwife.”

My friend said not to worry, that the NGO wouldn’t be able to find anyone in the country with the high qualifications they were looking for. Just put your name in the hat, she urged. She thought my resumé, which includes a long stint with a public health agency, would intrigue the NGO enough that they would ask me in to talk about what else I might be able to help them with. Which is exactly what happened. I start this month on a sort of retainer basis as their knowledge management consultant.

I’m pleased to take on this challenge. The NGO is staffing up quickly, from 4 people to 40 in the next six months, so they’re looking to establish some good habits early. Equally interesting to me has been the inside glimpse this episode provided me into decisions faced by so-called “re-pats”: Myanmar-born workers who left during the bad old days and are now wondering if now might be the time to repatriate.

According to most estimates, between 10-20% of Myanmar’s workforce lives outside the country. You find them mostly in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, but there are other pockets of relatively skilled, relatively English-fluent Myanmar people in Japan, the Middle East, and the West. Agencies like my friend's are cropping up to help these folks find the best matches between their talents and the country’s needs, from finance to telecom to tourism.

Some of the returnees are just testing the waters. They’ll rent out their Singapore condo while weighing the tradeoffs. If their expertise is IT, they may find themselves as big players in an area that has never really existed here. In other fields, making meaningful contributions may be harder, given Myanmar’s sometimes outmoded, entrenched ways of doing things. For example, as my friend noted, potential public health re-pats may shy away from the challenges of fixing a broken system.