The global refugee crisis and the career ecosystem

The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue about the “Impact of the Global Refugee Crisis on the Career Ecosystem” and summarise the key contributions of the included practitioner and scholarly papers which examine refugee business and labour market experiences. The paper also examines the impact of media reports to provide a broader understanding of the context within which the current refugee crisis is evolving.

The authors begin with a delineation of the concept of a career ecosystem in the context of refugee crises. The authors then employ this framing as a backdrop to engage in a basic analysis of business media coverage of the most recent Syrian refugee crisis, and a summary of the practitioner and scholarly papers.

The findings of the media analysis suggest major coverage differences between different groups of countries in the number of documents identified, the proposed aim of business engagement with refugees, and substance of the extracted statements generally.

The analysis of business media coverage is rudimentary and intended only as a prompt for further conversations about how contemporary media commentary impacts on career opportunities for refugees and relevant stakeholder practices.

This paper demonstrates the importance of including broader considerations of refugee careers that explore the interaction and intersection with transnational and local ecosystem of labour markets while paying attention to the sociocultural and political refugee-host community dynamics.

This paper presents a more systems-oriented perspective and provides both practice and scholarly perspectives on the composite and dynamic nature of the refugee crisis on career ecosystems more broadly.