When you look up recent job advertisements you may be perplexed to see some seemingly "fad" terms inserted into them with astounding regularity:

... must be... a "self-starter" ... "team-player" ... "bi/multi-lingual" ... "able to work with a diverse group of.." ... " able to adapt to a multi-ethnic/multi-cultural environment"... "able to achieve targets under pressure"...

And if you are like me, you would have split your hair helplessly, complaining loudly,"Why nobody told me this before? Where am I going to get all this experience just after school? Not in this lifetime."

But, there is a better option which will make your future interviewers gloss over your resume as if reading a novel and at the end just ask, "When will you be able to join us?"

That is the history of a foreign job or of an assignment abroad in your resume. That may even blind your potential employer to any void, inadequacy or bad patch in your domestic job experience.

Unfortunately, in the post-World War America, our attention was so riveted on some purported, unfinished war-related businesses and financing them, that we didn't realize when our superior advantages in socio-cultural and educational fields slowly drained off, due to poor funding and inattention.

Patriotic and proud memories of our worthy founding-fathers also made it difficult for us to believe that some of their later successors will be so insensitive to the erosion in our values.

But, we cannot waste our lifetime so lamenting, waiting for remedial actions or looking for scapegoats.

Instead, we can take up the responsibility ourselves for making up our deficiencies, looking for alternatives and moving forward.

One such opportunity is a short-term internship or a medium-term assignment abroad. Let us look at the advantages of doing it.

In one sentence:

It gives your future employer an assurance that you are a proven "self-starter" and "team-player" who worked "with diverse groups" while "adapting to multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural environments" and "achieved targets under pressure" in unfamiliar situations. Too many personal and professional goals in one shot!

Yes, you cannot have survived and finished a job in a foreign land among total strangers without acquiring all these attributes.

Now, let us turn to the broader issues involved.

With American industrial growth maturing to a plateau, it became necessary for US companies to move towards globalization. That

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