Traveling Onsite: Reasons (contd.): # 5

Reason 5: Strategic Staff Exchange

Long term relationships between a client and a vendor; joint ventures and partnerships; merger / acquisitions trigger the need for a strategic staff exchange program. The motive of such staff exchange program can vary from basic training knowledge sharing to a more intangible benefits like cultural sensitization, international exposure to staff (in order to scale up their abilities) or job enrichment (to keep the morale high).

Post-merger Consolidation measures often trigger large scale staff exchange programs wherein the teams of the two business entities work together in order to gel the systems, processes and work approaches together.
I once happened to witness some client side engineers to travel to India to work with their vendor's team just because they wanted to add 'international exposure' in their CV. Their complaint was that often Indians travel to US which inflates their profile whereas the professionals in US miss on this international exposure tag because company does not send them to India. So it was more of an HR issue which the client had to deal with. Not so often seen but yes, it has started to happen in US :-).