Guest Post: Getting a Job Overseas

Courtesy of Jim Key

Today’s guest post is brought to you by Jim Key, Director of Global Marketing at Intrax Internships Abroad. Learn about his suggestions to land an international job.

Over the past two years, I’ve met with companies in London, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, and Berlin – finding internships for American and Canadian university students. Other than spending time with our students during or after their summer internships overseas, the best part of my job is meeting with a variety of companies around Europe.  From speaking with those host companies and from working abroad during grad school, allow me to share a few ideas to help students and recent graduates turn an internship or short-term job overseas into a full time position.  The first step is to frame your actions in terms of what the employer wants instead of what you want, so that’s how I’ll frame these tips:

1.     Willingness to Speak the Local Language: If you can’t communicate with your co-workers, you will be of limited use to most companies regardless of how smart or skilled you are. While learning a language is the essential starting point, the operative phrase here is Willingness to Speak. Many people who get A’s in their classes get in-country and become more motivated by their fear of “looking stupid” than their desire to communicate. You can’t engage with your colleagues if you are waiting to get the wording exactly right – the conversation will move on and you will be that quiet intern who doesn’t talk to anyone. We had this one finance intern in Madrid, I’ll call him “Mike”. His Spanish was good (not great), but he was fearless. He might trip over an inexact verb or not know a word, but he was more committed to communicating than being perfect and his colleagues appreciated him for it.

2.     Be Professional and Adaptable: When hiring, employers ask, “Who would I want as a colleague/ employee?” Being professional means bringing your best self to work. This does not mean being vanilla, it means being the most engaged, most upbeat version of you.  Whether you want to or not, you represent your brand (and your country). Focusing on your brand for a moment, a co-worker’s estimation of what you can do is based on what you actually do at work (even if your job is not a perfect match with your full range of talents).  Sometimes it is easier to identify personality traits that employers clearly do not want: unreliable, rude, high maintenance, negative… You can add your own to that list and the list does vary a little by culture – not just national culture, but also industry and company culture.  The culture of a small Barcelona advertising agency is more like a small Berlin ad agency than a Barcelona pharmaceutical company. Notice and respond to your work environment – being on time may mean be available and prepared “on time”, even if the office culture considers meeting times to be a suggested best-case scenario for starting time. Adaptability means rolling with the way this country/industry/ office culture is. It also means a willingness to give a little more at times. This adds up to acting like a coworker rather than a student who happens to be in an office this summer.

3.     Show Initiative: Warning – cliché alert. Employers look for people who bring solutions, not problems. While it can be helpful for interns to point out that systems, products, and services could be improved, it is far more helpful for interns to identify a problem, suggest a few ways to improve it, and volunteer to lead the effort.  In our own office, we had an intern who said, “We should do a PR campaign.” If it stopped there, it would not be helpful because like almost every organization, we do not have the resources to do everything we would like to do. She continued with, “So I have identified 30 potential contacts along with a message to use. If it is OK with you, I’ll contact them with this message.” In a related story, she works for us full time now.  We hear stories like this from our host companies around the world. Those students interning through our program who get job offers often tell me stories like this. Final note: Initiative includes letting your supervisor and colleagues know that you want to work full time at that company or in that country.

4.     Competence in your Job: It should go without saying, but interns really do run the gamut from exceptional to abysmal.  Companies that do not want interns reach that conclusion because they have had experience with interns who created far more work to manage than they accomplished.  Even if your internship is not your dream job, doing what you do well will open doors – both within that company and among the professional contacts of your supervisor and colleagues. While the tips above will elevate your profile, it all starts with doing your job well.

Courtesy of Jim Key

Thinking about your strategy to turn an internship into a job, remember that employers hire people to improve their team.  How can you compete?  To start with, as a student from abroad, you have built in advantages and drawbacks. On the up side, you will offer fresh perspectives  – adding to the diversity and breadth of experience in most offices. On the down side, as an entry-level employee you will have less industry knowledge, (usually) less than native language skills, and less familiarity with the local culture. Let’s be clear, it is still a challenging economy so getting a job overseas is not easy. By thinking about your value from the employer’s perspective and performing at a high level, you can give yourself your best chance to turn an international internship experience into a full time position overseas.