Level Up! Taking Your PM Career to a New Country

Many professionals, Product Managers included, aim to expand their horizons by working in different environments and so it is only natural that PMs would want to experience work abroad. In this session, we have invited Chiara Cokieng, who is a co-founder at Gen Propel, a company that helps knowledge workers learn the skills to land a job and move abroad. She’s also a Product Manager at Giant Swarm, a tech company based in Cologne, Germany.

We will talk about the tips and tricks to land a job abroad: how to build a network, how to do your research, how to start a search, how to apply for a job… and how to succeed in landing a product management career that you have always dreamed of!

Chiara starts her talk about why she chose Germany as the country she would choose to work in. She went about it in a fairly logical way through the process of elimination. As her preference, she didn’t want to be in Australia and New Zealand as they were too far a way from the world, she didn’t want to be in the States because she didn’t want to deal with Trump, and she didn’t want to be in Canada as the job market there prefers “the Canadian experience” rather than international experience. This logic lead her to Europe and eventually to Germany, which had the strongest economy.

She follows the “Project One Hundred” rule where she reaches out to a hundred people who are hiring or who most likely knows someone who is hiring and reach out to them asking for a short chat on what it’s like to work in the country/role she is interested in. Through this process, she sent eight applications to warm leads that interested her.

Amongst the eight, one ghosted her (presumably because of bad operations from the potential employer’s side), four rejected her, and finally she received three offers where she chose one and that is the company where she is currently working today.

Note: Some foreign companies have a policy against hiring Filipinos because of the complications brought about by government regulations. For example, the Overseas Employment Certificate is needed to prove that the employer isn’t hiring the Filipino as a illegal sex worker and, although a reasonable intention, it is additional paper work for both the applicant and employer that the latter would rather not deal with.

Being Filipinos in the Product Management job market puts us at an advantage over the others in two aspects: our English-speaking ability is much better than most of the competition, and that Product Management is booming at this point in time — so have confidence!

A few common mistakes that people make when going through the job hunting process are:

• Considering editing their CVs as part of the “job hunting” process

It is not. There is no point spending week editing your CV and not sending it out and making people read it. This is often because the person is afraid of rejection but in not actively reaching out and telling people you are looking for a job, then no progress will ever be made.

• Sending a hundred applications

This is an easy trap to fall into because “job hunting” does mean applying for work but if you think about it, you’re most likely being rejected by a computer rather than a human being. Hiring managers get over five hundred applications in a day and so they do not have time to read all the applications — they reject you not because you aren’t good but because they don’t have the time to review your application and use computers to filter applicants through keywords.

• Focusing on being “better” rather than being “different”

Often times, people focus on being a “better” product manager or a “better” student but it will be hard for those looking at pieces of paper to understand which end of the spectrum your talent lands in. So instead, what details about yourself can you highlight that can make you different from everyone else and can help you stand out from the list of applicants flaunting the same things.

A quick run-down of the demo that Chiara did for the audience followed the following steps:

Scenario: Let’s say a Filipino PM wants to find a job in Sweden.

Method #1: Connect with individuals with the same nationality or alma matter.

Step 1. Look for Filipinos who are also in Sweden

Since Chiara is a University of the Philippines graduate, she logs in to LinkedIn and types in the search bar "university of the philippines" which she then further filters by location.

If there are enough results (in this case it was about two hundred and thirty-s seven people), then she can further filter the search by typing "university of the philippines" AND "product manager" .

Note: Do not reach out to students as they are unlikely to have a network that can help you.

Step 2. Once you find someone who looks interesting, you can visit their LinkedIn profile and send them a message whilst connecting with them.

Method #2: Look for companies that are based in Sweden and see what job openings are available.

Step 1. Go to LinkedIn Jobs, and then filter out to the country of interest.

Step 2. Find a job opening at a company that is interesting to you but instead of applying to that job opening, click on the Company Profile and then search through the people who work there who hold a position that is similar to what you are looking for and reach out to them asking if they had the time to tell you more about their company and role.

Job hunting is fucking hard and these methods might not work a hundred percent but being consistent in the process and committing to changing the mindsets and behaviors that hold us back to be able to achieve different and hopefully better results is the takeaway that Chiara would like attendees to keep in mind.

The Q&A session of the event is not included in this article. You can start listening to it through this link or jumping to the timestamp 43:00.

Do you want to get involved in the Philippines’ Product Management community? Check out Product PH at Meetup or on Facebook to learn more.