Finding Employment Abroad

The first step is having an updated resume showing both your relevant training and related work experience. According to your profession or training find out where job listings and advertisements are posted for people in your field of work. The professional organizations you might join hold conferences, produce newsletters, and promote journals, some of which feature notices or lists of job openings. Maintaining professional memberships and helpful subscriptions are worthwhile investments. For example, for jobs in higher education, the website on job openings offered by the Chronicle of Higher Education, a fortnightly, contains ads for thousands of jobs, some of which are in dozens of non-Western countries. To illustrate further, if your specialty is English language education, the international TESOL organization has both conferences and newsletters that offer help in a member’s job search.

Maintaining professional memberships and helpful subscriptions are worthwhile investments.

A person already employed with an international firm can respond to notices about company positions abroad or initiate a request for overseas placement when openings do occur. However, one should first understand something of the company’s policies and expectations for overseas employees in terms of housing and the degree of access to nationals the employees usually have. A tentmaker does not want to be limited to a social life mainly with foreign expatriates on a compound that is closed to nationals.

Other sources of information include (a) Global Intent (https://intent.org), a long-time organization offering services to both experienced tentmakers and would-be tentmakers, (b) university graduate students who originate from the country or region of your interest, (c) missionaries who are on home assignment who have returned from a country of special interest, and (d) relevant national agencies or departments of government for positions in the particular country of interest.

A more time-consuming and comprehensive approach that can be very rewarding is to spend a few weeks visiting key cities of interest for possible employment in the year or two that follows. The main purpose is to personally meet possible employers and learn from existing employees about local conditions and expenses for housing, children’s schooling, and costs of daily living. One can also sense the level of freedom for Christian expression in the local culture in order to prepare accordingly. My own three-week visit to five cities in the Far East late one summer before returning to my existing job in the Middle East led to two job prospects in the following months the first of which I accepted for the next school year. Each employer followed through on the conversation we had had and the resume I had given them.

For further discussion on the rise and practice of tentmaking refer to www.WorkingAbroadWithPurpose.com.