Expat Empire Podcast 12 | Personal Update #2

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Episode Description

In this episode, you will be hearing a quick update from David, the host of the Expat Empire Podcast, regarding his new job and location as well as what to expect from the podcast in the next few months.

Eli Hermit produced the music for this episode, please check him out at elihermit.bandcamp.com/. Learn more about Expat Empire at expatempire.com! Thanks for your continued support and we will be back with more episodes soon!

Episode Transcript

Hi everyone, and welcome to the 12th episode of the Expat Empire Podcast. I’m your host, David McNeill, and I am here to give you another quick update on my life and the status of the Expat Empire Podcast.

While I intend to go into the details of the last few months more in future updates, I wanted to get the news out as quickly as possible in the form of this short personal update episode.

To start at the beginning, I found out in April that my job in Berlin would be coming to an end at the end of June. It had been decided that there would not be many more updates coming to the mobile game that I was running as a product manager, and so my position was made redundant. This news was certainly not in line with the plan that I had in mind for the next few years, but this is life and I have had to learn to roll with the punches. All I could do was dust myself off and figure out my next steps.

Given that this was the third job that I had in only three years in Berlin, I felt hesitant to join yet another startup company here with an unclear future. If I have learned anything about the technology startup scene in Berlin, it is that while there are many opportunities available for adventurous expats, the quality of the companies may not be as high as you might like.

Therefore, my first instinct was to start looking outside of Germany for new job opportunities. After some brainstorming and research, my wife and I decided to focus on applying to jobs in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Tallinn, Lisbon, Porto, and Barcelona. I applied to all of the Product Manager positions that fit my personal criteria in those cities and then waited to see what opportunities would emerge.

To make a long story short, it took over 4 months to find the right role, but I am very happy to announce that I will be joining InterNations as a Senior Product Manager in Porto, Portugal starting in November. If you haven’t heard of it, InterNations is a social network for expats around the world, and I will be working on their new InterNations GO! expat relocation product out of the Porto office.

Porto is one of my favorite cities in the world, and this position is a perfect fit for the work I have done in my career including Expat Empire. Rest assured that I will still continue working on Expat Empire while in this role to share about my experiences in Portugal as well as those of expats around the world.

Now that the job hunt is over, my focus has turned to moving from Berlin to Porto and starting in my new role in less than two months. While I will still be busy until I settle down in Porto, I hope to provide some more content for you in the near future. Thanks to all of you for sticking with Expat Empire despite the recent lull in activity, and I look forward to sharing more details of what I have been doing over the last few months soon. Stay tuned!

Originally published at https://expatempire.com on September 24, 2019.