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This paper aims to investigate the interplay between international migration, soft skills and job and life satisfaction after returns.

The paper uses the dataset of Human Capital in Poland 2010–2014 representative surveys with 4040 return migrants, who worked temporarily abroad and returned to an origin in comparison with almost 70,000 stayers, who never worked abroad. In this study, Poland is treated as a strategic research site for the labor migration processes, which happened after the biggest European Union enlargement in 2004.

This study discovered that working abroad had a positive relation with cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies, as well as job and life satisfaction. However, the relations differ depending on the key destination country.

This study discusses the implications for future research and practice, offering recommendations to organizations on how to embed employees with these resources in companies and how to support return migrants and their potential employers with the use of migratory informal human capital in personnel management and counseling.

This paper brings quantitative arguments about the hidden impacts of international migration on human capital by uniquely comparing the migrant population with the non-migrant population.

Since Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004, migration from Poland to the UK has increased substantially. These migrants are generally young and highly educated, and are migrating for reasons of economic improvement and self-fulfilment. Many are women migrating independently, an emerging trend in migration in general. Information behaviour research around migration has tended to focus on populations such as refugees; less research has been done on the information behaviour of economic migrants. This paper, therefore, investigates the role of information in the migration experience of young Polish women in the UK.

This study takes an interpretivist, constructionist perspective. An exploratory study was conducted, involving expert and pilot interviews and analysis of secondary data. In the main study, 21 participants were interviewed using a semi-structured technique. Data were analysed thematically.

The paper provides insights into the information behaviour and experience of this migrant group. They were found to be confident and successful information users, partly because their migration was planned, their language skills were high and cultural differences from their host country were not substantial. Weak ties were an important source of information. The paper contextualises these findings against previous research on migration in information science, and presents a model of the underlying factors shaping the relationship between migration and information behaviour.

The paper examines the migration experience of a relatively understudied group, drawing attention to a broader range of experience and demonstrating that a wider conceptualisation of migration is required in information behaviour. It presents a model of key factors shaping information behaviour around migration, which is relevant not only to the information field, but also to a wider range of areas. It also delivers practical recommendations for migrants and those working with them.