Looking for a job as an expat? Methods to navigate your career

Embarking on the journey of finding a new job as an expat in a new country can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. Sometimes you get stuck before you even start looking for a job.

The first and easiest approach that comes to mind is likely to browse LinkedIn, look for open positions in your area of expertise, apply to hundreds of jobs, and hope someone gets back to you. 

Research by WifiTalents, a market research agency specialising in industry data, claims that 80 percent of jobs are never posted on public job boards and that 70 percent of professionals were hired at a company where they had a connection.

Management Consulted, an online training platform for consulting careers, reports that up to 70 percent of the available roles are never published.

How do you create these connections without a preexisting network?

Start by defining your ideal position. Take time to research average salaries, company values, and industry rankings, look up online comments and reviews, and attend in-person open days.

Doing your research is an essential part of a job search, especially for expats who may not yet have a wide network. Designing Your Life has a tip that can help this process: Conversation Prototyping.

Conversation Prototyping: a complementary method to the classic job interview

Designing Your Life is a framework inspired by design thinking research conducted at Stanford, and it offers a complementary approach to the classic job interview, giving more space to your curiosity.

Rather than immediately applying for jobs, you first explore careers through conversations with people already working in those roles. In these conversations, you are the leader, feeding your curiosity about a potential career.

Let’s break it down into steps:

• Choose a potential career direction
• Identify people who are already working in that role
• Make a list of your top five companies you would like to work for
• Reach out to these people and suggest an informal conversation, even over coffee, to ask questions

You could ask about what their daily life at work looks like, the tasks they enjoy most, the most boring or draining ones, and what their company environment and the working culture in the new country are like.

You get the chance to ask the questions you would never dare ask during a job interview, rather than having to provide the answers.

Advantages of Conversation Prototyping

Conversation Prototyping is a non-binding approach in which you are not committing to a job position; you are simply learning more about a potential career path and understanding what the job actually feels like for people already in the field.

Specific questions help you understand which tasks may give you the most energy, and which ones will drain you. In this way, you get to picture yourself in the role or even gain short-term experience through an internship or volunteer placement, before actually committing to a permanent job.

Research is extremely important, but real on-site experience and feedback are what count. Sometimes, a simple informal conversation can lead to valuable insights, new connections, or even unexpected professional opportunities.