What if you don’t settle for the opportunities of your local market?
What if you have some certain career goals and clear professional plans?
Let’s say that you have very sharp technical skills, you’re very good at process management and you consider yourself as ‘innovative’, would your ‘adequate in reading’, ‘average in speaking’ English be enough for accessing the international firms and clients?
One of the early barriers is business interviews or initial client meetings. The first contact is the door opening to further relationships, in other words, you either get the pass-key there or are ‘kindly thanked’ till an unknown future. During that meeting your intonations are important, your fluency is important, your clever and impressive explanations are important. Feeling not competent enough does not only affect your language capabilities but your thinking process and body language as well. You speak, you reply, you ask, you explain, but not to the extent that you impress them. It’s an ‘unnecessary’ failure.
Assume that you’re accepted to the company that you’ve always wished to be a part of or assume that you get the project from that famous client, then comes new challenges. Thousands of calls, video conferences, face to face meetings become your regular routine. Since your subject is a rather sophisticated one, understanding correctly, expressing yourself clearly, telling your project in a convincing manner are all your necessities. Carrying out all tasks satisfactorily might get very tiresome. Sometimes you feel that you hardly enjoy the job that you considered as your true identity.
Let’s go one step further. Assume that you somewhat managed all those, months or a couple of years passed by. Now it is time for you to get promoted or if you’re a vendor, it’s time for you to share your practices in conferences and seminars. Again, a new roadblock that has nothing to do with your coding or management capabilities is on your way. Being elected as a team leader means that you communicate very well. Being a speaker in an international gathering, even there are only a handful of people in that room is rather tough. You are expected to tell your experience in a way that is interesting to your audience. You are supposed to interact with them, reply to their questions in a satisfying manner. You need to influence them. If your English doesn’t support you with performing those, you can hardly experience those opportunities.
It’s clear from the very beginning: if you’d like to stay local, then there’s no problem. However, if your ambitions are bigger, then you come across all those issues. When you can’t introduce yourself to international communities, there’s no chance of going beyond your imagination. You have to interact with people from all around the world and prove the quality of your work by using a global language.
In order to achieve your dreams, you need to get down to business by globalizing yourself first; it means that a massive part of your job is to express yourself and understand others so that you can do your best to put in a remarkable piece of work to share with the world that is full of opportunities. Hey, wouldn’t you like to see what’s on the horizon for you?
