This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Expansion decisions are made in a boardroom with a market-size slide. They are lost eighteen months later over payroll structures, notice periods and a manager in another country who has stopped replying.

The strategy is rarely the thing that fails. The operating reality underneath it is.

What actually goes wrong abroad

The approach that works at home is exported unchanged, and the feedback style that reads as direct in one country reads as an insult in another. Decisions stall because one side is waiting for consensus and the other is waiting for an instruction. The first local hires are recruited on platforms nobody there uses, with a CV format that signals you do not know the market.

Then compensation is set by converting the home figure into local currency, which is wrong in both directions, and nobody has looked at what happens to the expat's tax position.

Deciding, and understanding where you are going

Thirty-eight lessons. Six on strategic planning as a process rather than an event: preparing the team, auditing where you honestly stand, stakeholder analysis, the two-day offsite, publishing the plan, and the step that usually fails — indicators, owners, resources and milestones.

Then eight on cultural difference used as a working instrument: the map of how cultures divide, high and low context communication, giving and receiving feedback across a boundary, negotiating, power distance and what it changes about leadership, consensus against authority in decision-making, constructive conflict, and attitudes to time that explain a surprising share of friction.

The infrastructure and the people

Then eight on managing internationally: PESTLE and expansion routes, global structures, mobility from expat selection through relocation to repatriation, performance across borders, learning at scale, employee relations including works councils and the international bodies, compensation design with grading and tax equalisation, and risk and compliance from data protection to internal investigations.

Then six on recruiting region by region — North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East — with the platforms, CV conventions, legal requirements and etiquette that differ in each.

And ten on distributed work, which is how a multi-country company actually operates day to day: the move itself, working rules, supervision that does not depend on watching people, tooling, engagement without a shared room, care at a distance, hiring and onboarding remotely, and culture that now has to be written down.

A note on scope. Two of the five blocks are built around people operations — hiring, mobility, reward, compliance. That is deliberate: in the first year of a market entry, those are the things that decide whether the strategy survives.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained across 185 countries, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals — all of them operating across borders, which is where every example here comes from.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

A question before you commit

Name the country you are considering, then answer three things: which platform local candidates actually use, what notice period is standard there, and whether decisions in that business culture are made by consensus or by authority. If any answer is missing, the market-size slide is not yet a plan. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.