Have you ever thought that if you want to live abroad, your best option is to go back to school?
I’ll go to school abroad and then I’ll use it to stay and work abroad!
Let’s play that out.
My friend Kim tried this exact strategy. She really wanted to go abroad, and going back to school for a masters seemed like the easiest way to do it.
So she applied and went abroad for a 1 year program in London, England. The program was good, but what Kim really loved was EVERY SECOND of living in another country!
After12 short months her program was ending and her student visa expiring! Kim had yet to find a UK company that would sponsor her full-time.
She tried applying for roles directly, asking professors for connections, inquiring about internships, visiting the career center, ANYTHING to let her stay in the UK.
She went on 2 interviews, and they both said she needed the right to work. Kim was feeling super defeated.
Shortly after, she had to return back to the USA.
When she booked a Breakthrough Session with me she was super down.
She didn’t want to be back in the US, and she certainly didn’t want to find work in the US either — because that meant she was starting her career back up outside of London!
To top it off, now after school she had student loans to begin paying right away.
See, Kim believed that if she went back to school abroad, that it would lead to a great career abroad, and a life permanently abroad. I mean, that’s a common thought, right?
But what really happened was that she used school as a means to get abroad – not her career – and ended up worse off than when she started because now she had to return back to the USA when she desperately did not want to!
So going to school abroad was great for 12 months, but it couldn’t last because the visa was tied to a program that had an end date, not a career where she could build off of.
At this point Kim had one question.
How do I get back to London permanently?
We talked through her options and decided that finding a job in London in her industry that included a visa was her goal.
And so we began the process of:
Extracting her professional and global skills
Defining her abroad elevator pitch
Generating leads and leverage data to find high-paying global roles
Acing any visa objection
Instantly Kim saw how this strategy was much, much different than what she was doing before. She was able to generate leads immediately and could hold her own when it came to the tricky visa conversation!
So if you’re considering going back to school so that you can live abroad ask yourself, why? Because if it’s mostly to live abroad, know that the student visa expires and you might be right back where you started shortly after.
But if you think that what you really want is a global career, then school might be an expensive misstep!
Let’s investigate how to leverage your career to get abroad.
All the adventures,
