Travel and ThoughtWorks

ThoughtWorks is a global IT consultancy with offices across four continents. Many people join us because they want to develop their careers in a global environment. We offer many opportunities for our staff to travel internationally; either to conferences, to work on projects or even to transfer permanently to different offices.

Local travel is very much part of being a ThoughtWorker. Working alongside users is a core practice of Agile projects and it's essential that we collaborate as closely as possible with our clients. We believe that this helps our projects to succeed; we can respond to changing requirements in real-time and make sure that the users are really involved. On the downside, this means that we are unable to accommodate requests for part-time, remote or teleworking for any of our professional services roles. We recognise that travel isn't for everyone. We want to be fair, and hiring people who can't travel within their home country would really limit their opportunities with us.

If you are considering joining ThoughtWorks, you should plan to travel. We call our North American consultants 'Road Warriors' as they regularly find themselves away from home Monday through Friday for up to nine months. The same is true for the UK, although the distances traveled are less. Our Australian consultants will sometimes travel interstate, for up to six months at a time.

Things are different in our Indian and Chinese offices. Our work here is distributed and so we have the luxury of having all of our teams working together, in the same space. Opportunities to do exist for people from these offices to travel though. Most distributed projects have a phase where members of the distributed team travel overseas to work with the users, client and other ThoughtWorkers on the team.

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