Big Rewards
Opportunities for Professional Growth
You will get to do high-powered stuff.
People at the workplace will typically treat you as a key contributor, as if they need you. You are likely to be entrusted with tasks critical to the introduction of new products.
You will get to wear plenty of hats.
One of the most challenging and gratifying results of working from my Singapore base was how the needs of the businesses forced me to wear numerous hats — performing in ways that I'd only heard about at cocktail parties. For example I unexpectedly found myself at the center of a campaign at Hewlett-Packard Singapore that produced a million-selling book in 15 languages — managing projects, negotiating and working with localization and translation companies, liaising with typesetters and other production people in distant parts of the world over the Internet, working on user-interface design, adapting to a speeded-up delivery date because of moves by competitors, interviewing and hiring and becoming expert with state-of-the-art technology in order to meet my deadlines. When I looked back over what I'd accomplished and learned over a short period, I was amazed.
Still another "hat" I had to learn to balance on top of all the other hats was course developer/university lecturer in "Communication and Mass Media," a subject that at that time I knew nothing about. I had to lecture to 250 of these foreign students, a prospect which at first filled me with dread. But I learned how to work with the students, whose preoccupations, training and needs were utterly different from those of North American students. And by now I've learned to teach or work in the area of mass communication.
Having to wear all the hats helped make my years in Southeast Asia the best, most satisfying period of my 14 years as a technical communicator. I was able to accomplish things — because I had to do them — that I'd not dreamed I'd know how to do; I carried to completion tasks experts could have proved to be “impossible.” I came back thinking that there wasn't anything I couldn't do.
You will learn about the cultural biases you bring to your work and how to deal with them.
Nancy Hoft provides an excellent discussion of cultural bias and cultural differences in her recent book International Technical Communication.
You can take advantage of business opportunities in regions like Southeast Asia where the economy may seem to explode.
While economies are typically cyclical and never altogether reliable, at any particular time there are always places where business conditions are better. And while the economy in Southeast Asia — the region I know best — is not lately booming the way it was back in, say, 1993, there is nevertheless a burning need to sell products globally. Many of the companies have discovered that they now must sell globally just to survive. And the need to sell in North America, Great Britain, and Australia, among other places, creates an insistent, nagging need for English technical communication. At the same time there is a shortage of writers with the skills to produce the needed documentation, creating excellent bargaining conditions for the writers.
In most places your credentials — even the academic ones — finally mean something.
The less "developed" the place, the more "newly" industrializing, the more your credentials, degrees and skills will be valued and even needed.
Academic credentials are especially highly valued in SE Asia, a further help in working out a good compensation package.
Maybe even good money — but not so fast!
In recent years there have been a number of disappointed souls limping home from Southeast Asia complaining that they had been lured by the (hasty) conclusion that "endless opportunity" was a polite term for quick money. Although substantial financial rewards are possible there and in other regions, one of the prerequisites is that you must devote tremendous time and energy to learning the lay of the land.
Opportunities for Personal Growth
- You will discover that you have a lot to offer.
- You will build enormous confidence.
- You will have a lot that you can learn.
Most dramatically on the personal reward side, working as an independent contractor gave me enough control over my schedule and travel arrangements that I was able to get to several regions of China, north and south Vietnam, Hong Kong, Penang and peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak, Sulawesi, Bali, West and Central Java, North and West Sumatra, and the Spice Islands.
You will be able to connect to people of a sort you would not meet any other way.
Then there are the people I've met, many hundreds of individuals — many of them of a sort I would not have met any other way. I like to imagine that I learned something from each of them, even the hair-splitting bureaucrats. Some I befriended. I now have a network of business and personal relationships that continues though I've moved on to San Francisco.
You will have opportunities to turn yourself inside-out!
On top of all these advantages, my point of view on everything feels as if it has been broadened. I have to an extent emerged from the narrow, parochial American outlook I had been trained with. I feel less disconnected from the world that includes the regions outside North America. I can understand the attitudes of many human beings from other parts of the planet, and I have lost — amazingly — my sense of alienation from them. Far more easily now I can see from the point of view of the set of at least the human beings on earth.
And furthermore, quite unexpectedly, I gained a deepened appreciation of the values and advantages of where I did grow up.
The combination of the cauldron of anxiety, colossal information overload, the hammering of a massive, unremitting workload, a sense that my old life was lost in a haystack a year away on Magellan's boat if I could bear the trip, then unlooked-for help from unfamiliar strangers, and finally my own unexpected ability to bring my resources to bear to make a contribution in so far away a place, so “unlikely,” so unrecognizable a culture — comprised for me almost an inside-out transformation.