Boomeranging: Expat to Repat

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.

S3 Ep3: Scott Cooper

New York, New York…If you can make it here, they say you can make it anywhere. And Scott Cooper is living proof.  Scott initially went to New York following his partner and her career. He didn’t have a job or people he knew and to make his situation even more challenging, this expat thought his new life was the right time to ditch his day job in civil engineering and move into digital marketing.

 

But there was one thing Scott knew how to do well, a skill that is universal the world over – Scott knew how to hustle. Over his first nine months in the city that never sleeps, he met friends of friends, contacts of contacts and was at Meet-Up groups three or four nights a week. Soon Scott was representing an off-Broadway play, a guitarist and a number of small tech companies. Scott says that in the US, people are more likely to give you a go at something new if they can see you are ambitious and passionate while in Australia, people struggled to give him a go because they couldn’t see beyond his civil engineering background.  In less than a year, Scott was offered his first US permanent role working for Waywire Networks, a video curation platform where he quickly worked up to the role of editor.  His career in helping grow companies had started.

 

After New York, Scott established himself with an Australian tech start up in San Francisco, and after San Francisco after nearly five years in the US, he returned to Melbourne and continued to work for businesses in their hyper-growth phase.

Now, after a career of starting again and helping companies begin and grow their own journeys, he is the COO at Versus Merch - just one of what is quickly shaping up to be a growing suite of businesses that he co-owns and runs.  Scott is still hustling but this time the confidence of a man who made it in New York.

S3 Ep2: Trena Blair

Trena Blair will be the first to admit, she didn’t want to come home from New York.  In her two and half years in the city that never sleeps, she had met all three of her New York goals – to volunteer at the Met, to study at NYU and to secure a role. And she was happy. Very happy. But a career opportunity back home in Sydney for her husband, meant their New York dream had to come to an end. 

 

Well, at least for him. 

 

For Trena, coming home with a job and a NY-based boss, meant she was able to jet back to her home away from home every three months.  However, after three years in this role, it was time for a new challenge, and this meant leaving the company and her regular work trips to New York.

 

Despite this, New York never strayed too far from her consciousness.

 

Trena took three months off to contemplate her next move and to complete the Australian Institute of Company Directors course.  At the course graduation event, she had a 30 second conversation with the person sitting beside her who had asked her ‘so, what’s your pitch?’  She said, ‘payments, travel and lived and worked in New York.’ The stranger told her to call him the next day and so began the start of her next career chapter.

 

Trena is the founder and CEO of FD Global Connections, specialists in US market entry strategies for Australian companies. Using her experience of the US market, particularly New York, she has created a niche service for Australian businesses and a new legitimate excuse to regularly travel to her favourite city outside of Australia.