Networking Pays Finding Professional Work Abroad

The job offer was what I’d always wanted: an opportunity to help the poorest of the poor and to be well compensated while working in a beautiful colonial city nestled in the temperate Andes of Ecuador. The process leading to the job offer was challenging.

I had applied for countless international development positions and learned to count myself lucky if I even received a rejection letter. Because nothing came of the long-distance job search, my wife and I decided to go to Ecuador, travel, study Spanish, and try to find work that would allow us to stay past the three-month tourist card limit. We knew we could teach English if we were not able to find jobs in our professional fields.
We chose Ecuador because it’s less expensive than most South American countries and we were traveling on savings. Ecuador is also a beautiful and varied country, culturally and artistically interesting. And Spanish is one of the most useful languages to bring back to the U.S.

I was surprised at the volume of information on Ecuador available on the Internet. I made a number of e-mail acquaintances in the months before our departure, including a web designer (www.ExploringEcuador.com), a Peace Corps volunteer, and a distributor of arts and crafts.

One of the first places we visited in Quito was the South American Explorers Club. From it’s volunteer board and folders I found information on a number of development organizations in Ecuador, most based in Quito. After preparing my speech in Spanish, I started calling organizations and explaining our situation to the director: “We plan to live in Ecuador for several years and are interested in working with your organization as volunteers or in another capacity.” I always tried to set up informational interviews to talk in person. Over a period of about two months I met with over 24 organizations, talked by telephone with another six organizations, and mailed resumes to about 10 more.

In our first week in Quito we used our Spanish lessons to translate our resumes into Spanish curriculum vitaes on our laptop computers. (We printed them out at one of the many cybercafes.) We also brought copies of our transcripts and reference letters. I found the interviews more productive when the interviewer had read my resume.

About half the interviews were in English and half in Spanish. I always left both my resume and my wife’s, and I always asked who else this person would recommend I contact.

Several people recommended CARE International, an international development agency. This proved to be the most difficult meeting to arrange, but ultimately the most rewarding. Not only was I offered a recycling management position in Cuenca–helping to improve the lives of the women who sort through the garbage and pick out recyclables to sell–but the opportunity to house-sit for the assistant director until the job came through.
After we moved to Cuenca, my wife found work as the academic coordinator for the Ecuadorian-American Cultural Center. A week later she received an e-mail from Pan American Univ., an elite university in Cuenca, looking for a professor to teach psychology in English. This too was the result of networking. We had dropped off our CVs and resumes twice and Kathleen had talked to the president, another American, by phone several times.

We both found professional positions–in Kathleen’s case, two positions–and none of them were advertised in the conventional manner we take for granted in the U.S. It paid to be persistent and never miss an opportunity to network.

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