Malaysia to Australia Success Story
Su Deo – Shares her Australian Job story
Sometimes it can seem as though two plus two must equal five in Australia. Su Deo was a qualified accountant in Malaysia for 18 years. She worked for a multinational corporation and two banks. When she left for Melbourne with her husband and two children in January 2005, she had been managing a major banking group’s credit card centre. “The first thing I did in Australia was register with seek.com.au,” she says. “In the very first week I got quite a number of calls from recruitment agencies, who said they would get back to me. Then nothing happened.”
The first thing everyone asked was if she had Australian job experience. “What can you say? It was difficult to digest,” she says. “I mean, the principles of accounting are very much the same whether you are in Malaysia, Europe or Australia.”
Su and her husband attended a two-month course at Box Hill Institute of TAFE specifi cally designed to help professionals from overseas who are seeking Australian jobs. “The course was very useful,” she says. “We learnt important job interview techniques and got an insight into Australian work culture. I believe the interview techniques were instrumental in us landing jobs.”
By the time she got her first break, in June, she was beginning to wonder if she and her husband had made the right move. They had both given up good jobs in Malaysia-he was a chemical engineer managing 100 workers-because they thought their children would have better opportunities in Australia.
Su began telling employers she would be willing to start at entry level, and she followed advice to downskill her résumé in case it was intimidating people. “I was told to keep it simple and not oversell myself.”
The Deos liked Australia and were finding it easy to assimilate, helped by the fact that they came from an English-speaking background. Su got involved in volunteer work at her children’s school and a football club. “It was good to have those things to mention to employers to indicate that I was adjusting well,” she says.
But in the end, she doesn’t know if they made a difference. It seems it was determination and persistence that led to an agency lining up an interview with a bank that landed her two months’ work in budgeting and financial forecasting. (Her husband finally found work in the same week.)
“They asked broad, macro questions and seemed more interested in screening for personality…”
An agency had already interviewed Su on behalf of Hewlett-Packard, but she was told the Australian job had been put on hold. Then she was offered the position just as the two-month contract with the bank was ending.
She is now on a renewable one-year contract as a financial analyst at HP.
“I felt I got lucky,” she says. “I know people who have been in Australia for more than a year and are still looking for their first break.” Interestingly, it wasn’t the down-skilled résumé that caught the eye of HP but her original version.
Most of Su’s interviews were first-level, at recruiting agencies, where she found that many interviewers knew little about the Australian jobs they were dealing with.
“They asked broad, macro questions and seemed more interested in screening for personality than the technical aspects of actually doing the job-mainly because they didn’t know exactly what the job involved.”
Sook Yee Yap – Shares her Australian Job story
When Sook Yee Yap couldn’t land the kind of job she wanted in the media, advertising or public relations, she took on a range of part-time and voluntary opportunities to expand her contacts and improve her skills. Sook Yee, 24, a Malaysian who went to secondary school in Singapore, came to Australia in 2001 on an international student visa to study for a Bachelor of Arts in media and communication at Melbourne University. She speaks English, Malay, Cantonese and Mandarin.
“My advantages over the locals in Australia are my language skills and cultural experience,” she says.
“I’ve found that the way to capitalise on my skills is to look into anything multicultural that would make use of my heritage.” After obtaining permanent residency, she looked for part-time work through job sites on the web while studying. “But it’s hard to get a job in the media when you don’t have experience in journalism, politics and that sort of thing. And in the advertising sector, they want people who have already been in the field for at least three to five years.”
Focusing on supermarket, department store and university job sites, she filled out registration forms and sent off dozens of applications. She was surprised to find that the vast majority of recruiters and employers did not so much as acknowledge that they had received her Australian job application. “After a while, when you don’t hear back from anyone, it can get discouraging. You don’t feel like looking any more. But you just have to keep trying. “One of the places I registered with was the supermarket chain Big W, which called back after two months. I went for an interview and got part-time
checkout work to help pay my bills while I searched for a better job.” She has also been doing clerical work at a high school one day a week.
Australia has two government television and radio services-the mainstream Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the multicultural, multilingual Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). SBS is a natural magnet for people in Sook Yee’s position.
“Graduates with language skills all look to SBS, which makes it very hard to get one of their cadetships,” she says. “In the last six months of my uni study this year, I’ve been an intern for the Cantonese language program and a volunteer for a multicultural
youth program at SBS called Confusion. I’ve organized a hip-hop concert under Confusion and produced a 10 to 15-minute radio feature for the digital radio trial at SBS.”
“I’ve found that the way to capitalize on my skills is to look into anything multicultural that would make use of my heritage.”
She has found further opportunities at student radio station SYN 90.7 FM (at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), which is always looking for volunteer producers to contribute to its programs.
When a Melbourne University orientation week brochure carried an advertisement for a youth website, Sook Yee decided to send in her résumé to see if they were hiring anyone. A few months later she was called for an interview and got casual part-time work as an advertising assistant with the organisation’s events management company. “They organise events for the Asian nightclubbing scene and have a website (visitkn.com, subtitled Asia Down Under). I started as an advertising assistant but later discovered that I’m more suited to editorial work. I’ve been put in charge of the website as editor and content manager.
“I’ve realised that I want to develop a career in the area of Asian youth media, and I’m doing that.”
Australian Job success stories are written by Steve Packer and published by Tribus Lingua
©Tribus Lingua 2007
