If there is one characteristic that captures well the dimension of the employment of European migrants, it is flux. Getting a job in Singapore or Tokyo is one challenge; to rise within the firm or to ‘successfully’ transfer jobs is another. The labour market and employment structure in Singapore and Tokyo could hardly differ more. Yet, despite these contextual differences, the golden thread running through migrants’ narratives and, in fact, their outcomes, are strikingly similar. Part II of this book sketches migrants’ professional trajectories over the years, which for many are their first years of employment, that is, the early career. This first stage in the working life is crucial for later career development. As such, the pages that follow zoom in on the process of migrants’ career building against the macroeconomic background of Singapore’s neoliberal labour market and Japan’s segmented labour market and in-house careers.

The main aim of this second part of the book is to tease out how migrants’ careers in the host labour markets evolve and how this impacts the EU Generation’s overall migratory trajectories in Singapore and Tokyo. Work has long ceased to be only a means to earn one’s living. As early as 1974, the US American Peter Drucker, the founder of management thinking, noted that ‘the shift in the structure and character of work has created a demand that work produce more than purely economic benefits. To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life’ (Drucker, 1975, p 179). Indeed, half a century later on a different continent, Drucker’s words are as topical as ever. For the EU Generation, as for so many others, work is not only a means to an end. For the EU migrants in Singapore and Tokyo specifically, work and career are guiding principles, partly because they are a prerequisite for residence in their migrant receiving societies but also because work and career assume deeper meaning on migrants’ paths towards a self-determined middle-class life in Asia. On the flip side, the 2010s have presented the early career generation with a situation where they can no longer be sure that a full-time job allows them to make a decent living.