Abstract:

“Stays abroad increase chances on the job market” – this conception persists in the minds of many university students as a motivational factor for planning a stay abroad. Particularly when conducted during the course of studies, a stay abroad is conceived an essential factor in résumés. With respect to job advertisements, however, the number of international requirements is surprisingly low (Heinze 2015). According to Heinze (2015) and Richert et al. (2016) there seems to be a gap between the students’ conception and corporate requirements and expectations towards potentially new employees. In order to further investigate the veracity of this assumption and to give recommendations on fostering careers, the topic has been approached from a different perspective. This additional perspective is concerned with the analysis of CVs of people in higher career stages such as upper management. The guiding research question was: is there a correlation between details on international experience of the CVs and the career stage?.

In order to gain insights into the perceived gap of conceptions, the paper available deals with the analysis of manager CVs in order to make generalised statements on the potential of stays abroad on career enhancement. These statements are concerned with the probability of stays abroad during university studies leading to higher, managing positions. For investigating this assumption a quantitative analysis was conducted by implementing big data methods in the language Java. Using a language such as Java has proven to be an effective way of gathering and administrating data. A sample of n = 49.753 (N = 100.156) manager CVs was extracted from the German online business network XING. Despite the German network as research basis, the sample also includes international CVs. The analysis was focused on manager CVs exclusively; thus, other job positions were excluded from the sample. The big data approach is not only able to analyse a major amount of input data, but also to gain results on a high variety of dimensions of the data investigated. For visualising the results gathered, an innovative, web-based method was implemented for viewers to interactively gain insights into the data.

Conclusively, an approach on investigating the cliché of stays abroad enhancing careers is identified and presented within the paper. As the hypothesis, however, on the potential of internationalisation in career enhancement is not generally confirmed with respect to CVs of people in hierarchically higher career stages, a qualitative analysis of exemplary, individual manager CVs displays the next step in the answer on the potential of internationalisation on career enhancement. If this potential can be confirmed by a qualitative analysis, it displays a starting point for improving or supporting measures of university in terms of internationalising their students.

Keywords:

Manager CVs, stay abroad, internationalisation, big data analysis, visualisation.