Boomeranging: Expat to Repat

S4 Ep2: John Versace

Career, lifestyle and financial goals are all linked and so is the planning.  John Versace is a financial planner at Apt Wealth and leads their expat practice. For the last six years he has talked to Australian expats every day in all corners of the globe, expats carving out careers in tech, medical fields, advertising, entertainment…even a few vets!

 

Australian expats come to John and his team at various stages of the ‘coming home’ process and while the initial inquiry is often financial, work and lifestyle tend to dominate the early conversations.  Knowing where someone is in their career and understanding a person’s lifestyle expectations are critical to John to understand an individual expat’s financial needs.

 

In this podcast, John shares conversations he is having with expats right now around career, lifestyle and financial goals and the trends he is seeing when it comes it comes to work back in Australia.

 

He also shares the common misconceptions many expats have about their finances coming home and when is the best time to start planning the move – both for the sake of your finances and your career.

S4 Ep1: Johanna Pitman

While the headline of a ‘skills shortage’ appears to be welcome news for any Australian expat planning to come home and find a new role, CEO of Advance.org Joanna Pitman warns it may not be the silver bullet expat think it is.

Johanna speaks from her experience not only as CEO of the professional network for global Australians who works with industry, government and Australia’s overseas expat community, but also as a 15-year expat herself who returned home in 2007.

 

Expats who are specialists in their field or who have spent 10 to 20 years away from Australia, need to be conscious of their ‘specialised skills set’. This skills set can have advantages delivering Australian organisations skills they ‘didn’t know they needed’ but can also be challenging in a skills shortage where organisations are looking for very specific skills to be met.  Johanna offers advice for how expats should approach the today’s local job market and how they should best position themselves and their experience.

S3 Ep7: Jan Lynch

Working overseas in much bigger countries and markets for many expats advances their career, however as Jan Lynch discovered when she came home to Melbourne, sometimes this overseas experience can advance yourself out of a career. This was what happened to Jan when she brought her e-commerce career from Hong Kong and China home in 2017.  According to Jack Ma, e-commerce in China is the ‘main meal’, in the US it is the ‘desert’.  When Jan came home, she realised in Australia, e-commerce was still considered a ‘side-dish’.

Not content to work in a ‘side-dish’ industry, Jan decided to start to abandon her e-commerce career altogether and start a new one. And it turns out studying something new and creative like interior design was just the tonic for this repat struggling with reverse culture shock.  Jan says coming home was the perfect time to re-skill, follow a passion and start a business, which she did two months shy of the start of the pandemic.

 

Two years on, Jan says her only regret about her career pivot was that she didn’t do it sooner.  But underpinning her bravery in starting her business was the resilience and adaptability she built as an expat so perhaps her Hong Kong experience delivered more than just a reason to change careers.

 

S3 Ep6: Wage Reis

Data and tech.  It is hard to find a skill and an industry in higher demand right now.  So when Wage Reis came home in March 2020 after two years working for Facebook in London working with the world’s largest advertising agencies she too was confident that having this juggernaut brand on her CV would at least start some conversations.

Only it didn’t. After six months of reacquainting with family and sending her CV to 20 recruiters and struggling to get even a phone call returned, she realised getting a job back home was going to be much harder than she originally thought.

Most Australian expats like Wage are coming home to a much smaller market – few see any advantages.  However fast forward 18 months and Wage has worked out how to turn Australia’s smaller size to her advantage.

 

Wage is now working for a London-listed, global company and has founded the Women in Data and Analytics community.  And she does this from, well, anywhere she likes.  This globe trotter is now an Australian-based digital nomad who has made Brisbane, the Whitsundays and Melbourne her office in the last year.

Find out how Wage turned 12 months of feeling like an imposter in her own country to re-igniting her global career and creating opportunities that she now admits, she could never have done in London.

S3 Ep5: Claire Pales

For Cyber Security expert Claire Pales, starting her own business was always on her ‘career to-do list’ but it came about sooner than she expected. She certainly wasn’t planning for it to be right after returning from four years in Hong Kong with two young children in tow.  However, some difficult experiences with local recruiters in Melbourne delivered her the ultimate blessing in disguise – it showed her a gap in the market.  And her experience as an expat, gave her the confidence to do something about it.

 

Today Claire runs her own advisory service helping companies identify and then hire the right cyber security specialists.  She runs a podcast called The Security Collective, has published two books and now provides advice to boards on cyber security risks.

 

By her own admission, Claire is risk adverse and she has a stellar career that speaks to this!  So while living overseas didn’t instil in Claire necessarily a sense of adventure, she says it taught her how to problem solve, be resourceful and how to fall on your feet in a foreign country.  She said, “It showed me a new way of living and gave me the confidence to start something new.”

 

She shares not only her story but what skills she learnt as an expat that have helped her build her businesses and the life she now enjoys.

 

S3 Ep4: Kate Hewish

Kate’s husband had been buying her books on gardening for years. But as a marketer in financial services for over 10 years in the UK, planting was always a passion pursuit for Kate not a professional one.

 

Coming home and settling in Brisbane, Kate thought she would continue her career in financial services only to be bluntly informed by a local recruiter that her career would not continue in Brisbane unless she was prepared to go into the mining sector. 

 

So, she threw herself into the project of building a house which eventually led her to focus on the clay patch that was her garden.  In Kate’s words, forgetting the garden is like “buying a beautiful dress but forgetting the shoes”.  To address her garden, Kate needed to get to know the native plants that thrive in Queensland so she enrolled herself in a local landscape gardening TAFE course. She loved it so much she picked up a couple of subjects in horticulture and before she knew it, she had completed this course as well.  For Kate, it was like a light bulb switching on, all of a sudden she found this amazing thing that she loved.

 

Several years ago, she started her own business ‘Horte Couture’, a landscape gardening and design business.  In creating her business, she has been able to bring to the table not only her previous business and marketing skills but all the skills she built as an expat – tenacity and persistence being the top two.

 

Since COVID, her business has thrived (yes, pun absolutely intended!).  Just like she did when Kate returned to Australia, people are pivoting their lives and the home has never been more important. 

 

Inside and out, plants are playing a role.