"I kept telling myself that all I had to do was hop on a plane
one night and the next morning I could be in a foreign country.
It was as easy as that." Dan Friedell, world traveler
"If you're going to make a move, make sure you do it for the
right reasons. Money is not always the best reason; it's
transitory," says Sean Dowling, 25, Branch Recruiting Manager
of Renaissance Worldwide. "Most of the people who do it hastily
or for the wrong reasons...don't make it."
So what are the "right" reasons?
For Sean, who moved to Houston last September, one reason was
career advancement. Frustrated by the fact that what he was
doing in Boston was not as satisfying as he had hoped it
would be, Sean decided to relocate and seek a better position
within his company elsewhere. "You always want to build upon
your career," he said. "I wanted to have four or five years
of experience, not four or five years of the same [type] of
experience duplicated."
The decision to move took Sean close to six months to make,
but he has no regrets. He welcomed the challenge and saw it
as a great opportunity to climb the corporate ladder his own
way.
Most people who have made similar moves while in their 20s
say that doing so is perhaps the best way to demonstrate to
your employer that you are not like the rest of the herd of
average employees. "It shows that you're a risk taker and
that you're willing to go out there and do something that a
lot of people aren't," says Annette Clovis, 23, an Analyst at
BT Alex.Brown.
Annette last year followed a love of travel to Hong Kong,
where she helped her company open an office. Though the
relocation was temporary, she says the experience was
definitely career- and personally-enriching. "You pick
yourself up off your little island and transplant yourself
into another country where you don't know how to do anything.
You start to see who you are and what your skills are."
Not every person who relocates does it strictly for
professional reasons, though. Many who move abroad, for
example, are people who had previously traveled and had
positive experiences doing so. For example, Dan Friedell, 22,
who spent five months working at ESPN in Bristol, CT after
graduating from college, moved to London last December
without a job waiting for him.
Dan had spent a summer in Prague and a semester in London
while he was in college, and he had a great desire to go
back. "Basically, I decided that the world wasn't such a big
place," he says. "I kept telling myself that all I had to do
was hop on a plane one night and the next morning I could be
in a foreign country. It was as easy as that."
However, moving with a suitcase but not a job can be
difficult. Those who have done it say the trick is to not let
a lack of job possibilities deter you. "You can be
intimidated about not having a job, but that's just going to
hold you back," Alexis advises. "You have to find what makes
you happy and what you feel comfortable with. Don't get
discouraged by the fact that you don't have anything lined
up. If anything, that's more of a challenge."
Note: This article was first published in
2001.
