2016

I finished my military service in Taiwan in 2016, then I came to Singapore to find a job directly. But after one face interview and some phone calls, I found that I didn’t have any advantage to compete with locals or other foreign professionals. I quickly realized that my language skills were not good enough to work in English countries. Besides, most companies only want to hire experienced foreigners and local graduates. Therefore, it was extremely hard to find a decent job initially. Finally, a start-up company gave me a chance to “work for free”. They said unfortunately, we don’t have enough budget to hire you, but we don’t mind that you work for us. What I had at that time were only confidence and Chinese skills. Hence, I accepted it and treated this is an opportunity to improve my English and understand the local culture.

My English started to improve after I had worked for a while. Meanwhile, I understood that if I want to survive in the Singaporean work environment as a foreigner, I must have some hard skills that cannot be replaced easily. Thus, I leveraged my engineering background and got another job as a mechanical engineer. But soon I found that IT and finance are the most promising industry here. I was thinking if I can combine engineering with IT so that I applied for an IT postgraduate program at NUS. Fortunately, I had a chance to enhance some hard skills there. After I studied IT, I found that engineering is quite similar to IT. One is to deal with a tangible product, the other is an intangible product. Although the way to design and produce is quite different, both have to be maintained and fulfill the business and users’ goal.

Now I am on my way to be a great product manager in FinTech field. There are a lot of people helping me on the journey. Thank them and I won’t let them down.