Online job boards in Africa cover a narrow slice of the labor market, because most work never gets advertised. More than 85% of workers in sub-Saharan Africa are in informal employment, and only about a quarter of the region’s new labor market entrants in 2024 and 2025 found formal jobs, according to an Ecofin Agency … Read more
The EU Talent Pool is a free online platform, built and run by the European Commission, that will match employers in participating EU countries with non-EU citizens who live outside the EU and work in one of 42 shortage occupations, from nurses and software developers to welders, cooks and lorry drivers. The regulation behind it … Read more
The US Department of Homeland Security finalised a rule on 14 October 2026 under which holders of several categories of US work permit, including the H-4 spouses of H-1B visa holders, can no longer keep working while a renewal is pending. The rule, published as 91 FR 65306, adopts without change an interim rule that … Read more
Sweden’s work permits now carry a salary floor of 90 percent of the national median wage, and extension applications filed from 2 December 2026 will face it too. For applications received since 16 June, the line is SEK 34,470 a month, based on a median of SEK 38,300. People whose permits were granted before 1 … Read more
Japan’s Employment for Skill Development (ESD) program is scheduled to start on 1 April 2027, replacing the Technical Intern Training Program with a three-year route into the Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) visa. The government announced on 23 January 2026 that it will accept up to 1,231,900 foreign workers through the end of fiscal 2028, which ends in … Read more
Labor shortages in several major economies have pushed governments to open or expand work visa programs for foreign workers in 2026. The scale varies, and so do the requirements. Some programs target university graduates. Others are built for technical or vocational workers with no degree at all. None of them are simple, and details change … Read more
Healthcare is one of the few sectors where global demand for workers is structural rather than cyclical. The WHO’s State of the World’s Nursing report projects a shortage of 4.1 million nurses by 2030, and the workforce is already deeply international: one in seven nurses worldwide is foreign-born, rising to 23 percent in high-income countries. … Read more
Most career advice about working abroad is written by people who have never come back. The more interesting conversation happens with people who went, built something real, and then made the deliberate choice to return home. What did the overseas years actually give them? What did staying away cost? And what do they think workers … Read more