There's one part of this globalisation process that people out on the consuming side of business haven't really noticed yet. Far too many people are still stuck on the idea that it is nations that compete with each other for economic opportunities like exports or imports. In fact it is companies that compete with each other for sales, they not really being very interested in which national boundaries such sales take place.

It is also true that globalisation (and within the EU this has gone even further) to say that it is almost impossible now to say with any finality which country a product actually comes from. Well, OK, we can tell where the orchard is an apple came from but with products any more complex than that, certainly, anything manufactured, there is simply no such thing as national production any more. For example, just about anything and everything these days contains at least some electronic parts. These imply the existence of both a chip fabrication plant (of which there might just be one or two left in Europe) and also of chip designers: who are in fact very rarely found in the same countries as those with the fabrication plants. ARM Holdings for example, sits in Cambridge and sells its designs worldwide. But when one of those chips ends up in a car engine, is it English? Or Taiwanese, where the fab plant was? Or where the engine itself was assembled?

Over and on top of this process of inter-company trade we also have the way in which intra-company trade is now conducted. It isn't just that companies are buying parts from other companies in other countries, but that within a company parts will be made wherever is most reasonable. Airbus is an example of this although that is of course driven by political reasons, not economic. But car manufacturers have engine plants in one country and then assembly plants in another. Who can really say with any certainty where the car is manufactured? Especially when the engine will be a goodly fraction of the final sale price?

What all of this means is that if the production process is now geographically spread then so is the marketplace for the experts in the field. Manufacturing managers are no longer part of a local or even regional economy. They're part of, at the very least, a Europe wide one. Thus both for those who wish to employ them and for those who wish to be employed it makes good sense to link up with the pan-European specialist in manufacturing recruitment: Talisman.