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Keep shoppingInternational Expansion: Enter and Grow in New Markets [EN]
2,680 students
International Expansion: Enter and Grow in New Markets [EN]
international expansion | market entry | cross cultural communication | global teams | international hiring | remote
Last updated 5/2025
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Run a full strategy cycle for an expansion decision, from audit to owned actions
- Read a market through a map of cultural difference rather than through assumptions
- Adapt feedback, negotiation and decision-making to the culture you are operating in
- Choose an expansion route: organic entry, acquisition, partnership or outsourcing
- Design mobility: selecting expats, relocation, support and repatriation
- Build compensation across borders, including grading and tax equalisation
- Recruit in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East
- Run a distributed team so the company works as one entity across time zones
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
14 sections • 38 lectures • 19h 10m total length
Requirements
- A company that operates in more than one country, or intends to
- No international law or tax background required. Every mechanism is introduced from zero
- Willingness to accept that your home-market approach will not transfer unchanged
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- A specific target market to think about while going through this
Description
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.
Who this course is for:
- Founders and executives planning entry into a second or third country
- Country and regional managers responsible for making a new market work
- Operations and people leaders building the infrastructure behind an expansion
- Managers who suddenly lead a team across several countries and time zones
- Recruiters hiring outside their own market for the first time
- Consultants advising on international growth
- Anyone whose company expanded and is now discovering what it did not plan for