Facebook Linkedin Instagram YouTube
Close

Category: Careers

A snowy mountain path — a visual metaphor for navigating imposter syndrome in career planning with the support of character strengths
Photo by Darío Méndez on Unsplash

Careers / Cross-cultural / Professional Identity

How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome: Using Character Strengths to Build Career Confidence

adminLeave a comment

There is a moment I still remember clearly almost 30 years ago.

I was on Grouse Mountain in Vancouver, in jeans and track shoes, in the snow, with an umbrella. Everyone else had proper hiking gear. I had confidence and completely the wrong clothing.

Within a couple of hours I was falling behind, soaked, exhausted, and genuinely convinced I was going to die on that mountain. Not metaphorically. Actually die. I felt like a complete fool — underprepared, out of my depth, and utterly exposed.

But I had one friend ahead of me and one friend behind. The one in front kept moving, showing me the path was real, that the summit existed, that someone who believed in where we were going was already further along. The one behind stayed close — not carrying me, not pretending the snow wasn’t there, but asking the right questions, keeping me moving, refusing to let me stop.

I made it to the top.

What I remember most is not the summit. It is the feeling on the way up: I have no business being here. Everyone else knows something I don’t. I am going to be found out.

That feeling has a name. It is called imposter syndrome. And if you have ever stood at the edge of a career opportunity — a job application, a networking event, an interview — and heard that same voice, you already know it does not care how qualified you are, how many years of experience you have, or how many degrees hang on your wall. It shows up anyway.

This article is about what to do when it does.

What Is Imposter Syndrome — and Why Does It Follow Us Into Career Planning?

Imposter syndrome was first named by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. They described it as the persistent internal experience of believing you are not as competent as others perceive you to be — despite clear evidence to the contrary. You attribute your successes to luck, timing, or other people. You wait for someone to discover that you are not, in fact, as capable as your CV suggests.

It is more common than most people admit. And it is remarkably resistant to credentials — in fact, for many people, more qualifications simply raise the internal standard against which they measure themselves, deepening the gap rather than closing it.

Imposter syndrome tends to intensify at moments of transition and high aspiration. A career change. A move to a new country. A dream role that suddenly feels within reach and therefore more terrifying than when it was purely hypothetical. These are precisely the moments when people are most likely to walk into a career coaching conversation — and most likely to be sitting with a version of the voice that says I am not quite enough for this.

It is also worth naming something clearly: imposter syndrome is not the same as structural discrimination or credential non-recognition, though those are real challenges that many international professionals face. Imposter syndrome is an internal experience — a distortion of self-perception — that can be triggered or amplified by external circumstances, but whose root is not in the system. It lives inside us. Which means the work of addressing it is also, ultimately, an inside job.

Does Imposter Syndrome Look Different for Everyone? Three Faces in Career Planning

Imposter syndrome does not wear one face. In my work as a career coach, I see it arrive differently depending on where a person is standing — what they have built, what they have left behind, and what they are reaching toward. Here are three portraits drawn from recent coaching conversations. The names are pseudonyms, but the experiences are real.

Priya — the high-flying professional who can’t bring herself to network because she feels fake

The imposter who mistakes integrity for inadequacy.

Priya has had a successful, high-achieving career. She is accomplished, credible, and well-regarded in her field. But she has changed countries and changed sectors simultaneously — and in this new context, she is effectively starting again. The reputation, the relationships, the recognition she built over decades: none of it is visible here yet.

She knows, intellectually, what she needs to do. Everyone tells her: network, network, network. So she goes to the events. She arranges the coffee chats. She shows up. But each time, she walks away feeling like nothing landed — the conversation didn’t reach a natural conclusion, she couldn’t tell whether she had made any impression, and the whole exercise felt vaguely hollow.

Her goal, stated plainly: “I just want people to think of me when they see a job opening.”

That goal is completely understandable. It is also, unfortunately, the problem. When networking is framed as a covert job-seeking operation — a performance with a hidden agenda — it becomes almost unbearable for someone whose top signature strength is Honesty. Priya is not avoidant by nature. She is refusing, at a deep level, to be disingenuous. What she had labelled as networking anxiety was, on closer examination, something more precise: a principled objection to superficiality.

The coaching reframe began with a different question: not how do you get people to remember you, but what do you actually want to contribute? When Priya answered that — and she answered it with real clarity and passion — something shifted. She has a specific direction, a genuine value proposition, and a real reason to connect with people in her field. That is not a hidden agenda. That is the foundation of an honest conversation.

Honesty, reframed, is not the obstacle to networking. It is her most powerful networking tool. Networking is not a one-time transactional event where you hint at wanting a job and hope someone takes the hint. It is a slow, cumulative building of relationships over time — and the foundation of any lasting professional relationship is that the other person feels they have met the real you. Priya, at her most honest, is extraordinarily easy to remember.

Marcus — the ambitious Kiwi who can see everything but can’t start anything

The imposter who has everything to offer and nothing yet to show.

Marcus is a second-generation Asian New Zealander with a deep, genuine loyalty to his country. He is not lost or directionless — he is rooted here, proud of being here, and driven by a real desire to contribute to New Zealand’s future. The problem is not direction. It is volume.

He has ADHD, and his mind generates plans A, B, and C simultaneously. The richness of what he wants to do — the breadth of his ambition, the number of things he cares about — becomes its own obstacle. Everything is live. Nothing gets traction. He sits with a head full of ideas and a calendar full of intention, and somehow none of it moves.

His imposter syndrome does not sound like I am not good enough. It sounds like I haven’t proven it yet. I have all these things I want to do, and I haven’t done any of them. Who am I to claim any of this?

The coaching conversation shifted when we talked about expanding his network through volunteering and taking on a personal project — something concrete, something self-directed, something that did not require a job title or anyone’s permission to begin. His eyes lit up.

That moment of energy — the sudden specificity, the shift in posture — was the signal. For Marcus, the unlock was not insight. It was action. A first move. Something real and small enough to actually start.

The character strengths of Zest and Creativity generate all those plans and sustain the ambition behind them. But without Self-Regulation and Perseverance as intentional counterweights, Zest and Creativity can keep a person in perpetual motion without forward progress. The personal project gives those strengths a container: a bounded, real thing that can be started, worked on, and completed. Evidence, at last, that the ideas can become something.

Lin — the scholar who measures herself against everyone she admires

The imposter who cannot see that her deepest strength is her greatest qualification.

Lin is a Southeast Asian scholar completing her second Masters in New Zealand, preparing to return home. She came here with a purpose that grew clearer the longer she studied: she wants to take what she has learned back to her country, to contribute to the development of the people and the place she loves. That purpose is specific, genuine, and alive in her.

But she is surrounded by peers who have already moved into the roles she dreams of. People she respects deeply. People she reaches out to for advice and guidance. And every conversation that should build her confidence does the opposite. She hangs up the phone feeling smaller. They are so much further along. So much more assured. So much more ready.

The comparison is not hostile — her peers are not dismissive of her. The diminishment is entirely self-generated. Imposter syndrome flattens others into paragons and flattens you into an outline. It does not show you people as they actually are. It shows you the most polished version of them against the most unfinished version of yourself.

Lin is not unqualified. She is twice-qualified. But qualifications have become the measuring stick she uses against herself rather than the evidence she uses for herself — and by that measure, there will always be someone with more.

The coaching turn came through her VIA profile, where Kindness emerged as a top signature strength. At first, this felt like the wrong answer. Kindness does not sound like ambition. It does not sound like the profile of someone who leads development work or shapes policy.

But the more we explored what Kindness actually meant for Lin, something changed. Her desire to take new knowledge home, to contribute to the development of her country and her people — that is not abstract professional ambition. It is care. It is Kindness at scale. When she named that — my people, the place I love, the futures I want to help build — she came alive. The quiet, self-doubting scholar became someone with a mission.

Kindness, in Lin’s case, is not softness. It is the engine. It drove two postgraduate degrees. It sustains her intellectual curiosity. It is what will make her extraordinary in people-centred work — because she is not motivated by status or performance. She is motivated by genuine care. That is rare. And it is powerful.

Her peers may have the titles and the track record. But Lin has something that cannot be manufactured: she knows why she is doing this, and that why is deeply human.

These three people are different in almost every way — background, career stage, challenge. But they share the same internal voice: I am not quite enough for this. And in each case, that voice is working from incomplete information — discounting the very evidence that would contradict it.

Is Imposter Syndrome Just Self-Doubt — or Something More?

It is worth distinguishing imposter syndrome from ordinary nerves or healthy humility. Most people feel uncertain before a high-stakes conversation. That is normal, and it usually passes once you are in the room.

Imposter syndrome is different. It persists despite evidence of competence. It intensifies at moments of opportunity — the bigger the chance, the louder the voice. It attributes success to external factors while attributing difficulty to something fixed and internal. And it is remarkably skilled at discounting evidence that contradicts it.

Across the three portraits above, three distinct patterns emerge:

Mistaking integrity for inadequacy — when a genuine strength, like Honesty, is experienced as a limitation because it makes the conventional approach feel impossible.

Paralysis by potential — when the gap between what you can imagine contributing and what you have so far done creates a vacuum, where everything is possible and nothing is started.

Social comparison pitfall — when proximity to people you admire produces diminishment rather than inspiration, because imposter syndrome shows you their outside and your inside at the same time.

Naming the pattern matters. It is harder to challenge something you cannot see clearly.

Can Character Strengths Actually Help with Imposter Syndrome?

Imposter syndrome is, at its core, a story about what you lack. Character strengths work is a story about what you already have — and have always had, regardless of which country you are standing in, which sector you are entering, or how your peers appear to be doing.

This matters because strengths do not require translation. They do not need a local referee or a recognised qualification framework. Your Honesty, your Kindness, your Curiosity — these crossed every border with you. They were present in every role you have held, every challenge you have navigated, every moment where you showed up and did something hard. Imposter syndrome systematically obscures this. Strengths work systematically recovers it.

The VIA character strengths framework, developed through positive psychology research by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, identifies 24 strengths that represent the best of who we are. Everyone has all 24 in varying degrees. Your signature strengths — those that sit at the top of your profile — are the ones that feel most natural, most energising, and most essentially you. You can discover yours by taking the free VIA Survey at viacharacter.org — it takes around fifteen minutes and gives you a full ranked profile. I also wrote a foundational introduction to using character strengths in career development here.

What makes this framework particularly useful for imposter syndrome work is that it reorients the conversation from deficit to evidence. Not what do you lack but what have you always brought? Not why aren’t you ready but how have your strengths already been at work, even in the moments you felt most out of your depth?

Which Character Strengths Help Most with Imposter Syndrome?

Every person’s profile is unique. But four strengths come up repeatedly in imposter syndrome coaching conversations — either because they are already present and being underused, or because consciously calling on them creates a meaningful shift.

Bravery — How do you show up when every instinct says stop?

Imposter syndrome’s primary strategy is avoidance. Not applying until you feel more ready. Not speaking up until you are more certain. Not going to the networking event until you have figured out exactly what to say. Waiting, in other words, for a readiness that will not arrive on its own.

Bravery is the counter. Not the absence of fear — nobody is asking you to stop feeling afraid — but the willingness to act in spite of it.

A Māori whakataukī captures this with more precision than most English formulations manage: Tūwhitia te hopo, mairangatia te angitū. It is often translated as “feel the fear and do it anyway,” but the literal reading offers something more useful: tūwhitia te hopo means eliminate the negative; mairangatia te angitū means accentuate the positive. It is not just encouragement. It is a deliberate reorientation of attention — from what might go wrong to what is already right.

For Priya, walking into a networking event in a new country where nobody knows her name yet requires more Bravery than almost anything she did at the height of her previous career. Showing up anyway is an act of courage that deserves to be named as such.

Honesty — What does it mean to own your story accurately?

Imposter syndrome involves a fundamentally dishonest internal audit: it counts the gaps and discounts the evidence. It tells a story that is partial, skewed, and systematically unfair to you.

Honesty as a strength means accurate self-assessment — neither inflated nor diminished. It means being willing to look at the evidence of your own competence with the same rigour you would apply to evidence about anything else.

For Lin, this means being willing to own what two postgraduate degrees, a clear purpose, and genuine care for her people actually represent — not as performance, but as fact. For Priya, it means recognising that her discomfort with superficial networking is not a weakness to overcome but a strength to reframe: she does not need a different personality. She needs a different understanding of what networking, done honestly, actually looks like.

Curiosity and Love of Learning — What happens when you get curious instead of self-critical?

Imposter syndrome turns attention inward and keeps it there, generating an endless loop of self-monitoring. Curiosity pulls attention outward — toward the other person, the question, what there is to discover.

In a networking conversation, this shift is quietly transformative. Instead of monitoring every word for signs of inadequacy, you are genuinely interested in the person in front of you. The focus moves from performance to engagement — and engagement is precisely what makes people feel they have had a worthwhile conversation.

For Marcus, Curiosity reframes his wide-ranging interests not as scattered attention but as a genuinely rich mind. The personal project is not just an action item. It is a vehicle for directed curiosity: something specific to learn, build, and contribute to the world he cares about.

Love of Learning adds something essential: not yet knowing something is not a disqualification. It is the beginning of every meaningful professional journey.

Perspective — Can you see your whole story, not just the chapter you’re in?

Imposter syndrome collapses time. It makes the present feeling of inadequacy feel like permanent truth — as though the discomfort of this moment is evidence of a fixed limitation rather than a temporary condition.

Perspective is the capacity to step back and see the larger pattern — to hold your whole story, not just the part that currently feels hard.

Priya’s decades of leadership are not erased by the difficulty of starting over in a new country. Marcus’s passion and generative mind are not cancelled by the fact that he has not yet started the project. Lin’s qualifications, her purpose, and her Kindness are not made irrelevant by her peers’ current positions.

Perspective allows you to say, in accurate self-knowledge rather than self-congratulation: I have already done hard things. This is another hard thing. That is not evidence that I cannot do it.

What Can Career Practitioners Do When Clients Show Up Stuck?

If you work with clients navigating imposter syndrome — and most career practitioners do, even when it is not named as such — the character strengths framework offers a practical, evidence-based coaching lens that goes well beyond reassurance.

A few principles that have shaped my practice:

Name it first. Before problem-solving, name what you are observing. “What you’re describing sounds like imposter syndrome — have you come across that term?” Many clients have never had language for the pattern, and naming it creates immediate relief. It makes a private struggle into a recognised experience. It also separates the feeling from the person — imposter syndrome is something you are experiencing, not something you are.

Distinguish the internal from the systemic. Is this self-doubt, or is there a real external barrier? Both can be true simultaneously, and conflating them helps neither. The coaching conversation shifts depending on the answer.

Use strengths as evidence, not affirmation. The most useful strengths conversations in imposter syndrome work are not about telling clients they are wonderful. They are about helping clients build a concrete, specific evidence base. Not “you are so kind” but “tell me about a time when your care for people produced a real outcome”. Evidence, not encouragement, is what shifts the internal narrative over time.

Follow the energy. Watch for the moment of aliveness in the session — the lit-up eyes, the shift in posture, the sudden specificity when a client talks about something they genuinely care about. That is almost always where the signature strength lives, and it is where the coaching work becomes generative.

What Questions Can Career Coaches Ask Clients Experiencing Imposter Syndrome?

  • For the imposter who mistakes integrity for inadequacy (Priya): “What do you actually want to contribute — not what do you want to get, but what do you want to give? Start there.”
  • For paralysis by potential (Marcus): “If you couldn’t fail and didn’t need anyone’s permission, what would you start tomorrow? And what’s the smallest version of that you could begin this week?”
  • For social comparison pitfall (Lin): “When you think about the people your work is actually for — not the peers you’re measuring yourself against, but the people you most want to help — what does that feel like? Who comes to mind?”

If you work with clients navigating these dynamics and would like a reflective practitioner community to explore strengths-based approaches in depth, I facilitate the CDANZ Special Interest Group on Character Strengths — open to members and non-members, held bimonthly online. The next meeting is on Tue 16 June 2026, 7:00-8:00 pm (NZ time) – register for the meeting.

How Do You Start Overcoming Imposter Syndrome?

Whether you are a professional in career transition, a student preparing to enter the workforce, or someone who has been sitting on a job application for longer than you would like to admit — here is where to begin.

Take the free VIA Survey at viacharacter.org. It takes around fifteen minutes and gives you a full ranked list of all 24 character strengths. Read your top five slowly — not as flattery, but as a mirror.

For each of your top five strengths, write down one moment in your career or study where you used that strength under pressure. Not your finest hour necessarily — just a real moment. This is the beginning of an evidence base that imposter syndrome cannot easily argue with.

Use your strengths language in your career materials — in your CV, cover letter, and interview answers — not as buzzwords but as grounded claims backed by specific examples. That is more memorable and more credible than almost anything a generic template will suggest.

Download my character strengths reflection worksheet to support this process and connect your strengths to your career planning.

If the imposter voice is particularly loud, consider a coaching conversation. Sometimes the most useful thing is not a framework but a person — someone who can hear your story, help you see what you cannot see from inside it, and ask the question that shifts something. Book a free 20-minute discovery call to explore whether coaching might help.

Finding Your Way to the Summit

I made it to the top of that mountain in Vancouver. Soaked, exhausted, in entirely the wrong clothes — but there.

I had one friend ahead of me the whole way. He had already been up this path. He didn’t make the climb easier, but he made it real — the summit existed, someone I trusted was already moving toward it, and I could follow. In your career, that friend is your future self: the version of you who has already done this hard thing, who is already in the role, already past this moment of doubt. They are further along the path, showing you it can be done.

And I had one friend behind me. She didn’t carry me or pretend the snow wasn’t there. She asked questions. She kept me moving. She believed in where I was going even when I had stopped believing in it myself. In your career, that person is your coach — or your mentor, your trusted colleague, the voice that prompts you forward and refuses to let you stop.

Neither of them climbed the mountain for me. But without them, I would not have reached the top.

That is what character strengths work offers, and what good career coaching makes possible. Not a shortcut. Not a guarantee. But a clearer sense of who you already are, and two steadying presences — one showing you where you are going, one walking with you as you get there.

Mā te huruhuru ka rere te manu

Adorn the bird with feathers so it may fly.

Your strengths are already there. The work — and the joy — is in learning to wear them.

About Dr Sherrie Lee

Dr Sherrie Lee is a career coach and educator for international professionals — born in Singapore, based in Wellington, and working with clients worldwide. She specialises in cross-cultural and mid-career transitions, and brings a strengths-based, research-informed approach grounded in her own lived experience of navigating careers across countries and cultures.

She is a Professional Member of CDANZ, an Associate Fellow of Advance HE, and leads the CDANZ Special Interest Group on Character Strengths — a bimonthly community of practice open to career practitioners at all stages.

Learn more at thediasporicacademic.com, book a free 20-minute discovery call, connect on LinkedIn, or subscribe to the monthly newsletter International Career Journey on Substack.

Career development and educator identity beyond academia – reflective professional journey in higher education
Photo by Dallas Penner on Unsplash

Academic Identity / Careers / Cross-cultural / Education / Higher Education / Learning / Professional Identity / Teaching / TESOL

Professional Development, Professional Identity, and Being Recognised as an Educator Beyond Academia

admin1 Comment

“Don’t become a teacher,” said my parents, who were only ever teachers.

I listened to them at first, quite happy not to follow in the footsteps of parents who spent hours preparing lessons, marking assignments, and managing never‑ending administrative tasks. Yet I also chose to major in English Language and Literature, subjects that were unmistakably associated with teaching.

After experimenting with roles in content writing and arts management, which neither paid well nor offered strong career prospects, I ate a sizeable slice of humble pie and tried relief teaching at my former high school. I enjoyed engaging with students and even lesson preparation, but I was not prepared to commit to the bonded years required after teacher training in Singapore. So I did what felt like the next best thing at the time: I became CELTA‑certified and taught English overseas.

Fast forward to the present, in my current role as a Career Consultant at a university in New Zealand, and I had almost forgotten about those early roles and decisions. Partly due to embarrassment about short‑lived career experiments, and partly because they felt distant and irrelevant.

Yet, through reflection, they have become anything but.

Photo by Matt Ridley on Unsplash

In an earlier blog post, I explored how my 25‑year journey across roles, sectors, and countries only made sense in hindsight. At the time, those moves felt messy, uncertain, and at times like a series of compromises. Looking back now, I see a consistent career thread of learning facilitation, people development, and cross‑cultural brokering that underpinned what once felt like disconnected choices.

More recently, making a career pivot from government to higher education heightened my awareness of the need to gain formal recognition of my skills and professional practice in this new context. That realisation prompted me to apply for Associate Fellowship (AFHEA) with Advance HE.

The Advance HE Fellowship scheme offers globally recognised professional recognition for educational practice in higher education. Associate Fellowship recognises staff with focused or limited teaching responsibilities and validates expertise in supporting learning, evidenced through professional values, core knowledge, and effective practice.

Achieving Associate Fellowship has become a meaningful moment in my career journey, not only for the recognition it confers, but because it helped me make sense of what I have been doing across different contexts and periods of time.

Navigating Career Pivots and Professional Identity in Higher Education

In my work with international professionals navigating career change, I often hear fragmented career stories. “I used to be this, then I moved countries, then I pivoted.” Roles change, systems change, and over time it becomes harder to articulate a coherent professional identity.

I experienced a similar disconnection when my government role was made redundant after years of building expertise across projects and enjoying hard‑earned success. I had already pivoted from academia into the public sector. Did I really have to pivot again? When I eventually moved into higher education, I found myself asking: What career story am I telling now?

Associate Fellowship offered a way to answer that question – through a framework I could use to tell that story more clearly.

Professional Staff as Educators: Teaching Beyond Academic Roles

Much of the discourse around teaching and learning in universities still centres on academic roles. Yet many of students’ most formative learning experiences happen outside lecture theatres and formal curricula.

When I look back, my educator identity has been shaped across very different teaching contexts, each with distinct learner needs and purposes.

I began as a CELTA‑trained English teacher in China, teaching academic English to students preparing for entry into Australian and UK universities. That work was fundamentally about transition. It involved supporting students to develop not just language proficiency, but confidence, academic literacies, and cultural readiness for unfamiliar higher education systems. Teaching language was never just about grammar. It was about meaning‑making, belonging, and bridging worlds. I vividly recall organising English Corners and analysing English‑language films to unpack cultural idioms and assumptions.

I later returned to Singapore to work as a conflict management trainer, and subsequently as a polytechnic lecturer, teaching in a multi‑ethnic context with a strong emphasis on vocational application. My core subject area was business communication, including report writing, oral presentations, job applications, and cross‑cultural communication. I also taught corporate communications and events management, often partnering with businesses across the tourism and heritage sectors to deliver real industry projects. Learning was tightly linked to employability and practical outcomes, requiring constant translation of theory into action.

Today, I work at a university in Aotearoa New Zealand as a career consultant, where employability is a central outcome of my professional practice. I design and facilitate career preparation workshops, support reflective and peer‑based learning, and help students connect their learning, identities, and strengths to future work possibilities. I am particularly proud of developing workshops using the VIA character strengths framework, as self‑awareness is the starting point for authentic career decision‑making, job applications, and networking.

Across all these contexts, while the learners, content, and systems differed, common themes emerge in my work. I design learning for transition. I facilitate reflection. I support people to navigate uncertainty with greater clarity and agency.

Photo by lilartsy on Unsplash

This broader understanding of teaching aligns closely with Eleanor Hodgson’s Times Higher Education article, Professional services staff, you’re educators, too. By focusing on educational practice rather than job title, the Advance HE Professional Standards Framework creates space for professional staff roles like mine to be recognised clearly and legitimately as educational.

Personally, the framework has helped me connect the dots across my career. It gives me a shared language to articulate a teaching identity that has evolved across countries, sectors, and roles, without requiring me to be narrowly defined as a traditional academic. It also reconnects me to my PhD research on international students’ informal learning and peer brokering practices, where learning exists on a continuum from transactional to deeply relational.

Professional Development as Identity Work

Applying for Associate Fellowship was not simply an exercise in documenting activities. It required me to articulate a teaching philosophy, evidence learner impact, and engage in structured reflection on my practice. Peer observations and written narratives became mirrors, revealing how my pedagogical choices were shaped as much by learner needs as by my own beliefs about learning.

The application process was also a deliberate investment in professional development, a topic I explored in my blog post about my international career journey. For international professionals, professional development is rarely just about skill acquisition. It is about sense‑making, coherence, and continuity in systems where progression pathways are often opaque.

Across different national contexts, I have had to take responsibility for designing my own professional development. This involved identifying formal and informal learning opportunities, engaging in communities of practice, creating reflective spaces, and seeking credentials that validate professional standards and competence.

The Fellowship process brought this into sharp focus. It forced me to slow down, to examine not just what I do, but why I do it, and to demonstrate how learning actually happens in my workshops. In many ways, it brought me back to the fundamentals of teaching and career practice: reflective inquiry.

Portfolio Careers, Global Recognition, and Evolving Educator Identities

Viewing my career through a portfolio lens has reshaped how I understand professional identity. What once felt fragmented now looks cumulative. Teaching, research, public sector roles, training, and career development have been layered experiences that expanded my capacity to support learners navigating complexity and change.

Does Associate Fellowship mean I now rest firmly in a single educator identity?

Not quite.

It strengthens my ownership of being an educator, but I hold multiple identities. If migration, career setbacks, and career pivots have taught me anything, it is to value what I have built while holding those identities lightly. When my sense of self was anchored too tightly to a particular role or occupational label, restructuring and redundancy felt like devastating blows to my sense of worth. Over time, I have come to appreciate that changes in jobs and direction do not derail a career. Instead, they cultivate different capabilities within me.

What Associate Fellowship adds is not rigidity, but language. It provides a coherent framework to articulate educational practice across roles, institutions, and national contexts. For international professionals especially, this matters. Credentials need to travel. They need to be recognisable, legible, and meaningful across countries, systems, and sectors where professional experience is often reassessed or retranslated.

Advance HE Fellowship is underpinned by the Professional Standards Framework, a shared global reference point for excellence in teaching and learning in higher education. While rooted in education, the values and practices it articulates extend well beyond classrooms. They speak to how people learn, develop, reflect, and grow within complex systems.

For someone whose career has spanned Singapore and New Zealand, this global recognisability is not incidental. It offers continuity in a career shaped by mobility, change, and adaptation. It allows me to articulate my professional identity in a way that is coherent across borders, without being restricted to a single role or occupational pathway.

The feedback from the assessment panel affirmed this alignment in ways that felt deeply validating:

“Your application was very strong and clearly addressed both the Professional Standards Framework and the University values of Akoranga and Manaakitanga in the area of career consultancy, which would inspire professionals supporting learning in higher education. Your teaching philosophy was well articulated and strongly aligned with your practice, and the supporting letters provided clear recognition of your impact and contribution. Wishing you all the best in your continued professional journey!”

Receiving this feedback was more than a moment of affirmation. It reinforced that the educator identity I had been practising across different contexts was both visible and valued, even when it did not fall neatly within traditional academic boundaries.

For professional staff in higher education, particularly those who have crossed borders and sectors, frameworks like the Professional Standards Framework can provide a language to articulate impact on students’ learning and development. They can help bring coherence to diverse experiences or illuminate capabilities you may not have seen as educational before.

For international professionals, professional development carries an additional imperative: credentials must travel. Advance HE Fellowship offers globally recognised articulation of educational practice that is legible beyond individual institutions or national contexts. For someone whose career spans Singapore and New Zealand, this matters. It provides a portable way of naming professional identity in environments where experience is often re‑evaluated or misunderstood.

Photo by Ben Mathis Seibel on Unsplash

Reflective Practice: Coming Full Circle

What stands out most about the Fellowship experience is how much I enjoy reflective practice, especially when it is often sidelined in the everyday busyness of targets, outputs, and deadlines.

I was first introduced to reflective practice during my Master of TESOL, which I completed part‑time while teaching at a polytechnic. Reflection assignments tied directly to teaching practice led to tangible improvements in my work. As a researcher, reflexivity underpinned my inquiry, requiring critical examination of how my beliefs, positioning, and shared cultural background influenced the research process.

Now, as a career practitioner, reflective practice involves evaluating client experiences, interrogating the systems we work within, and advocating for more equitable support. While reflective practice exists within team settings to varying degrees, this experience reminded me that I need to be more intentional at an individual level.

The Fellowship experience offered a glimpse of what reflective practice can achieve in terms of becoming more learner‑centred and improving outcomes. It has renewed my commitment to intentionally designing programmes that strengthen students’ career identities and employability resilience.

Attaining Fellowship does not mark a new chapter so much as a return. A return to reflective practice as the core of my work, and to an educator identity that has been evolving across unexpected twists and turns. It now sits comfortably alongside other professional identities, past, present, and future, within an international career journey I am still very much living.

About Dr Sherrie Lee

I am a career coach and educator working at the intersection of career development, cross‑cultural capability, and identity. I support globally mobile professionals and career changers to navigate career and leadership transitions across cultures.

With over 10 years’ experience in teaching, facilitation, coaching, and career development across Singapore and New Zealand, I bring a research‑informed, strengths‑based approach grounded in lived experience. I hold a PhD in Education, am an Associate Fellow of Advance HE, a Certified Career Services Provider™, and a Professional Member of the Career Development Association of New Zealand.

I am based in New Zealand and work with clients and organisations internationally.
Learn more at https://thediasporicacademic.com, connect with me on LinkedIn, or subscribe to my newsletter International Career Journey on Substack.

International professional using character strengths to network across cultures at a professional event

Careers / Cross-cultural / Professional Identity

How Character Strengths Help You Network Better Across Cultures

adminLeave a comment

When You Feel Like a Fish Out of Water

That is how I would describe myself in many networking moments — watching people fall into easy conversation and laughter while I find myself alone in a corner, wondering how they make it look so effortless. It happens when I am in a room full of strangers, when the topics seem out of my league, when the jargon jungle closes in around me.

But then I remember why I came: to meet new people, learn something useful, and give new connections a chance to form.

In my first few years in New Zealand, I was acutely self-conscious of the way I looked and how I sounded. My fair skin and black hair meant I was frequently assumed to be from China (I’m from Singapore), and well-meaning folk would greet me with ni hao — to which I would simply say hello in return. For context, this was Hamilton: a smallish university city with international students coming and going, and a particular brand of parochialism I found difficult to reconcile with my very urban, cosmopolitan outlook. It was humbling, and at times uncomfortable.

While I was completing my PhD, I focused on building an academic network, attending as many symposiums and conferences as I could manage. But when the academic career did not materialise, I found myself having to build a completely different network — business owners, public servants, entrepreneurs — people who did not especially care that I had a doctorate. Venturing from the safe harbour of academia, where people enjoyed discussing abstract ideas and methodological debates, into a world of money, practicality, and politics, was disorienting and, at times, disaster-prone.

Speech bubbles of different shapes and colours representing different small talk topics

What saved me, eventually, was small talk. Once I could talk to one person about the weather, the food, or what was interesting about the venue, the rest felt more possible. Rapport came first. Everything else followed.

I share this not as a cautionary tale but as context: feeling like a fish out of water in networking situations is not a personal failing. It is an experience shared by international professionals navigating unfamiliar cultural codes, by migrants rebuilding professional lives from scratch, and by introverts everywhere who find the whole enterprise exhausting before it has even begun. What helps — for all of these groups — is not a better script or a more polished elevator pitch. It is a clearer sense of who you already are, and how to bring that forward with intention.

This is where character strengths come in.

What Are Character Strengths and Why Do They Matter for Networking?

The VIA character strengths framework, developed through research in positive psychology by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, identifies 24 strengths — qualities like Bravery, Curiosity, Kindness, and Zest — that represent the best of who we are. Everyone possesses all 24 strengths in varying degrees. Some sit near the top of your profile almost without your noticing, because they are so intuitive. Others require more conscious effort. All of them are genuinely good, and all of them have a positive impact on others when applied with awareness.

Taking the free VIA Survey at viacharacter.org gives you a ranked list of all 24 — your own unique character profile. And here is what I have found, both in my own networking journey and in working with international professionals and career coaching clients: when you understand your strengths, networking becomes less about performing a version of yourself you think the room wants to see, and more about bringing forward what is already there.

It is also worth thinking differently about what networking actually is. It is not a dreaded event with fancy drinks and a business card quota. It is a series of small moments — a question asked, a laugh shared, a follow-up email sent three days later. It is not the event that gets you a job. It is the small conversations that help people remember you. That shift in framing alone can take the pressure off considerably.

Below, I want to walk through four character strengths that I have found particularly useful in networking contexts — especially for those of us who feel culturally out of place, socially uncertain, or simply not built for working the room.

Bravery: How Do You Face the Fear of Walking In?

To be brave is to face your challenges rather than avoid them.

A Māori proverb or whakataukī captures this beautifully: Tūwhitia te hopo, mairangatia te angitū — feel the fear and do it anyway. But the literal translation offers something even more useful: tūwhitia te hopo means eliminate the negative; mairangatia te angitū means accentuate the positive. It is not just encouragement. It is a strategy.

Bravery in networking might look like tuning out the voice that says it will be a room full of strangers who have nothing to say to me, and replacing it with I might learn something useful from someone I have never met. That is a small but significant reframe — and it is exactly what Bravery, applied intentionally, makes possible.

Bravery also works well in combination with other strengths, particularly Creativity. If walking into a room alone feels too exposing, Creativity might suggest going with a friend and treating it as a social outing. Or setting yourself a small, manageable goal — two new connections added to your LinkedIn network by the end of the evening — rather than facing the whole room at once. Small targets, honestly pursued, are far more useful than ambitious ones abandoned at the door.

If Bravery is in your top five strengths: you likely already show up, even when it is hard. The work is in noticing that courage and giving yourself credit for it. If it is not: Bravery is a strength you can call on deliberately. Naming the fear, finding a manageable first step, and walking toward it anyway — that is Bravery in practice, regardless of where it sits in your profile.

Curiosity and Love of Learning: What Happens When You Get Curious Instead of Self-Conscious?

If Bravery gets you through the door, Curiosity and Love of Learning are what make the conversation worth having.

Curiosity is the motivating force that draws you toward new experiences and new people. Love of Learning is what happens next — the desire to hold onto and deepen what you discover. They are among the most closely related strengths in the VIA framework, and together they are, in my experience, the ideal combination for navigating an unfamiliar culture. They give you a reason to be in the room that has nothing to do with impressing anyone.

I remember hovering at the edge of a group already deep in conversation, smiling and nodding as people spoke. Mutual eye contact was my cue to offer a question. I made mental notes of what was interesting. I watched how others moved easily between groups — a friendly nice talking to you, hope to see you around and they were gone, joining another conversation entirely. In many Asian cultural contexts, leaving a conversation feels impolite. Here, it is simply how networking works. Curiosity helped me observe that without judgment, and Love of Learning helped me file it away.

Getting curious about the other person also has a liberating side effect: it takes the focus off yourself. The more I thought about networking as making friends rather than securing career opportunities, the less stressful it became. Nothing to lose. Everything to gain. And a much better opening line than Hi, I have a PhD, what do you do? — which I have, regrettably, actually said. A genuine question, a light observation about the event, or even a shared complaint about the weather will take you much further.

For international professionals specifically: your cultural unfamiliarity is not a liability here. It is material. Genuine questions about how things work in your new country — asked with real curiosity rather than performed interest — make people feel interesting and valued. That is a networking superpower many locals do not have.

Social Intelligence: How Do You Read the Room When the Rules Are Unfamiliar?

Social intelligence is the ability to be aware of and understand our own feelings and thoughts, as well as those of the people around us — and to respond in ways that are appropriate to the situation.

It is worth distinguishing it briefly from the related concept of emotional intelligence. While emotional intelligence focuses on identifying and managing your own emotions, social intelligence extends further: it includes understanding the dynamics of relationships and interactions, reading social situations accurately, and responding in ways that actually land. In a networking context, this is the difference between knowing you feel nervous and knowing what to do with that nervousness so it does not derail the conversation.

Here is a real example. I once approached a group at a networking event and asked what had brought them along that evening. The answer was brief: our company are event sponsors and we got free tickets. The group was clearly comfortable among themselves and not especially interested in conversation with a stranger. I felt foolish for a moment. Embarrassed, even.

But Social Intelligence gave me a second reading: these were likely regulars who had attended too many of these events, were there out of obligation, and had probably exhausted their networking energy hours ago. It was not about me. So I smiled, nodded graciously, and walked to the food table — partly to regroup, partly because the food was genuinely good — and looked for someone else who seemed more available for conversation. Drink in hand, I felt considerably less exposed.

That small recalibration — moving from what did I do wrong to what was actually happening in that interaction — is Social Intelligence at work. It does not eliminate awkward moments. It helps you recover from them without losing your footing.

For those who find networking socially exhausting: Social Intelligence also means knowing your own limits. Arriving early when the room is quieter, giving yourself permission to step outside for a moment, setting a time limit for the event — these are not cheating. They are self-awareness in action.

Putting It All Together: How to Use Your Strengths Before Your Next Networking Event

Whether Bravery, Curiosity, Love of Learning, and Social Intelligence appear at the top of your VIA profile or further down, they are all available to you. The question is how consciously you are drawing on them.

If these strengths are among your top five: bring them to networking moments with more intention. Notice when you are using them well, and when anxiety is quietly suppressing them. If they sit lower in your profile: here is an opportunity to develop them — to bring them to mind deliberately, practise them in lower-stakes situations, and notice what shifts.

Whatever your profile looks like, the goal of networking is not to become someone you are not. It is to bring who you already are into the room — with enough cultural awareness to calibrate how you express it, and enough self-knowledge to know what you are working with.

Start with the free VIA Survey at viacharacter.org. Fifteen minutes. Twenty-four strengths. Your own unique profile, ready to be put to work.

For Career Practitioners: Supporting Clients Who Struggle with Networking

If you work with clients who find networking uncomfortable — whether because of cultural unfamiliarity, social anxiety, introversion, or simply never having been shown how — the character strengths framework offers a practical and genuinely useful coaching lens.

Rather than beginning with tactics, begin with strengths. Ask your client what they already bring into a room. Help them name the courage it takes to show up at all. Explore with them which strengths they are suppressing out of anxiety versus which they are calibrating with cultural awareness. These are different conversations, and they lead to different outcomes.

I facilitate the CDANZ Special Interest Group on Character Strengths — a warm, reflective community of career practitioners exploring how strengths-based approaches can deepen our work with clients. Our next meeting is on Thursday 23 April 2026, 7–8pm (NZ time), and the topic is directly relevant if you support clients who find networking challenging — whether that is international professionals navigating a new cultural context, or anyone dealing with social anxiety or uncertainty about where to begin.

The meeting is open to CDANZ members and non-members alike.

Register here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/1FIbsNPYRGS9SydcbXqb6w

Dr Sherrie Lee is a career coach for cross-cultural and mid-career transitions, based in Wellington, New Zealand. She is a Certified Career Services Provider™, leads the CDANZ Special Interest Group on Character Strengths, and works with international professionals, migrants, and academics navigating career change across cultures. Learn more at thediasporicacademic.com or book a free 20-minute discovery call.

International professionals applauding a speaker

Careers / Higher Education / international education / international students / Professional Identity

The Credential Trap: Why International Professionals Struggle to Get Hired in New Zealand

adminLeave a comment

For career-changer migrants navigating the gap between their qualifications and the New Zealand labour market — and for the advisors, institutions, and communities who support them

You did not come to New Zealand on a whim.

You spent months — maybe years — researching pathways, weighing up options, talking through the implications with your family. You chose a postgraduate programme strategically, understanding that study was the most viable route toward the life you were building here. You arrived with qualifications, with experience, with drive. And you arrived with a reasonable assumption: that the career you had built in your home country would count for something in this one.

It does count. But perhaps not in the way you expected.

This article is for two audiences. First, the career-changer migrants: mid-career professionals who are using international study as a deliberate migration pathway and want a clearer map of what the New Zealand  labour market actually looks for. Second, the career advisors, student services practitioners, and academic staff who support them, and who need better frameworks for the specific and often overlooked challenges this cohort faces.

Because these two conversations belong together. What happens — or fails to happen — in a career advisory session has direct consequences for a real person’s ability to build the life they came here for. Career-changer migrants have made a huge investment of money, time and energy to study, often at postgraduate level, with a clear goal of finding work and settling in their destination of choice — and hope.

The Career Changer in the Room: A Cohort We Rarely Name

Most career support services are designed around a particular image of the international student: someone in their early twenties, fresh from an undergraduate degree, holding three possible futures lightly — return home, stay here, or move to a third country. That image is real for many students.

But it is not the whole picture.

A growing cohort arrives looking very different. They are in their thirties or forties. They have ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty years of professional experience. They are not holding their futures lightly — they have already made the decision. They enrolled in a postgraduate programme because it was the most viable pathway to the permanent residency they are working toward. Study, for them, is not just getting a degree. It is a calculated means to a specific end.

Researchers have named this pattern “edugration” — a deliberate blend of education and migration, where international study becomes a structured, multi-step immigration strategy. A 2024 study of Indian postgraduate students in the United Kingdom found that most participants were using the education pathway as a deliberate entry point to permanent residency, and most were in their late twenties to forties, with significant careers behind them (Udayanga, 2024). New Zealand is not unique in this — but our support systems have not kept pace with it.

If you are that person reading this: you are not unusual. You are part of a well-documented and growing cohort. And the challenges you are encountering are not a reflection of your capability — they are a reflection of a gap between what you were told the pathway would look like, and what it actually requires.

Qualified and Overlooked: Why Overseas Credentials Don’t Travel Well

Aria (a pseudonym) came to New Zealand from India with ten years of human resources experience at several global brands. She had managed recruitment pipelines, led organisational design projects, and navigated large, complex organisations. She enrolled in a postgraduate Master’s programme as her migration strategy — deliberate, planned, well-researched.

And she arrived believing that her experience, combined with a New Zealand qualification, would open doors in the local HR market.

This is an entirely reasonable belief. It is also, in the New Zealand context, incomplete — and that gap between reasonable expectation and local reality is where this cohort most needs support.

A systematic review of 74 studies on international graduate workforce integration found that immigrants’ earnings — particularly those with foreign degrees or who arrived at an older age — are consistently lower than their qualifications predict (Han et al., 2022). A local qualification helps, but even that does not fully close the gap with locally born graduates. Recruitment processes frequently demand the display of cultural capital — a tacit familiarity with local norms, communication styles, and workplace expectations that no overseas role, however senior, can fully provide. Employer bias, often framed as a question of “cultural fit,” operates alongside formal qualifications — and sometimes more powerfully than them.

Critically, credential recognition does not just affect whether you get hired — it affects the quality of what becomes possible once you are. Zikic and Klehe’s (2021) quantitative study of 356 skilled migrants found that when migrants’ credentials were not locally recognised, the positive effects of career planning on employment quality were significantly reduced. Put plainly: it is not only harder to get through the door without recognised credentials — it is harder to plan meaningfully toward the career you actually want once you are inside.

The question New Zealand employers are really asking is not ‘What have you achieved?’ It is ‘Do you understand how we work here, and do you know anyone who can vouch for you?’

This is the credential trap. It catches capable, experienced professionals not because they lack ability, but because they arrive with an incomplete roadmap. Pham et al. (2024) found that international graduates consistently underestimated the importance of social and cultural capital before entering the labour market, only discovering their critical role after failing to secure roles. University programmes — including postgraduate ones — emphasise qualifications and skills. They rarely prepare students for the filters that actually operate in the local labour market.

What New Zealand Employers Are Actually Looking For

New Zealand’s labour market has features that are easy to miss if you have New Zealand’s labour market has features that are easy to miss if you have worked primarily in large multinational environments — even Western ones.

Workplaces here tend to be flat in structure and relationship-driven in culture. Decisions are made through conversation and consensus as much as through hierarchy. Communication is often indirect — understatement and humility are read as positive attributes, not weakness. And community involvement is genuinely woven into how people are assessed: not as a nice-to-have on a CV, but as a signal of character and belonging.

Aria had spent her career in organisations where Western multinationals set the cultural tone. She was fluent in global business English, comfortable with performance frameworks, experienced across cultures. She assumed this would translate. But the specific nuances of New Zealand workplace culture — its particular combination of informality, egalitarianism, and community orientation — was something she had not encountered before. This is not a deficit. It is simply unfamiliarity. And unfamiliarity can be addressed — but only if it is named.

Research on social capital and migrant integration in Aotearoa notes that New Zealand has one of the highest immigration rates in the OECD — nearly 30% of the population is foreign-born — yet the labour market remains deeply relationship-driven (Roskruge & Poot, 2025). Bridging social capital, meaning connections across different groups and communities, is especially important for migrants’ employment outcomes. Bonding capital — connections within your own cultural community — matters for wellbeing, but it is not sufficient for career advancement on its own.

The practical implication of this is significant. Pham (2020) found that 45% of graduates secured their first role through personal introduction — not through formal job applications. For career-changer migrants, this statistic has particular weight: the professional network they spent a decade building is, for most practical purposes, inaccessible from New Zealand. They are not starting from zero in experience. But they are starting from zero in local networks. And local networks and connections are how most people here actually get hired.

The Support Gap: Why Generic Career Advice Isn’t Enough

When Aria came to see me, she expected we would focus on CV formatting and interview technique. She was six months from completing her Master’s and thinking in tactical terms.

What she needed was a different kind of conversation entirely.

Me: “You’ve got great experience, and New Zealand employers will respect that. But what they’re also asking themselves is: does this person understand how things work here? Can they navigate Kiwi workplace culture? Do they have connections in the local community? Those things are harder to show on a CV, which is exactly why we need to start building them now.”

Han et al. (2022) identify this as a meso-level challenge — not a gap in individual capability, but in the institutional and organisational supports surrounding international graduates. Career services may be limited in scope due to resourcing constraints, or oriented toward the local student who is still deciding what to do with their degree. The career-changer migrant — who already knows exactly what they want — needs something different: structured planning support, and quickly.

Zikic and Klehe (2021) found that it is career planning, not career exploration, that predicts employment quality nine months later. Students who moved early into goal-directed planning — a specific target sector, a realistic entry-level role, a timeline, a network-building strategy — achieved significantly better outcomes. The implication is clear: the first advisory conversation with a career-changer migrant should begin shifting them from orientation into planning. For this cohort, open-ended exploration is a luxury they cannot afford.

Research on the  education-migration nexus in Australia  found that many experienced international student migrants describe their trajectory as resembling an endurance race — requiring sacrifice and resilience they had not anticipated (Tran et al., 2025). Many ended up in roles well below their previous seniority, not through lack of capability, but simply to keep the migration pathway open. This is the predictable shape of a transition that is poorly mapped in advance. Career practitioners who understand this can reframe it as a phase — one with a logic and a timeline — rather than leaving students to encounter it as an unexpected and demoralising surprise.

Volunteering as Community Entry: Building the Network That Gets You Hired

When I told Aria that volunteering should be her immediate priority, she heard it as advice to fill a gap on her CV. I had to reframe it — that volunteering was meaningful way to understand local culture and contribute to a community.

Me: “This isn’t about your CV. You already have plenty for a CV. This is about building the network that will get you introduced to the role you actually want. In New Zealand, that network starts in the community. Volunteering is how you enter communities you’re not yet part of.”

A New Zealand-based longitudinal study by Soltani and Donald (2024) provides a framework for understanding volunteering and community engagement as part of career planning.  Their study of postgraduate students — including international students from Asia — found that participation in a landscape of practice: engagement across multiple communities including volunteer organisations, student networks, church groups, and workplace settings, was the primary mechanism through which international students built social and cultural capital simultaneously. International students engaged in significantly more boundary encounters — deliberate crossings into new communities — than their domestic peers, because their existing networks simply did not transfer.

For the career-changer migrant, this is the critical insight: volunteering is not just a a quick way to get local experience. It is the means by which you enter the social fabric that underpins life in New Zealand. ISANA New Zealand notes that community engagement is viewed on CVs here not merely as initiative, but as a signal of cultural integration — of genuine commitment to belonging, not just to working.

Soltani and Donald also found that lecturers and institutional contacts played a bridging role — providing access to professional networks that international students could not yet reach independently. This is why alumni mentoring programmes, employer engagement events, and career expos are not optional extras for this cohort. They are the scaffolding that makes boundary encounters possible before students have built enough local presence to create them on their own.

Practical starting points for career-changer migrants like Aria include the university’s volunteering and leadership programme for students, Volunteer Wellington, and the Yes for Success work experience programme. Student clubs and professional associations offer lower-stakes entry points — places to build intercultural fluency and local presence before taking it into job interviews.

Your Strengths Are Real — Here Is How to Deploy Them

If you are the career-changer migrant reading this, here is what the research — and career practitioners working with this cohort — want you to hear:

You are not starting over. You are carrying a decade or more of professional experience, cross-cultural competence, and the kind of resilience that comes from making a major life transition deliberately and with clear purpose. What changes is not your capability — it is the context in which it needs to be demonstrated, and the strategies needed to activate it.

Zikic and Klehe (2021) found that two personal resources were the strongest predictors of quality employment for skilled migrants: proactivity and social support. Proactivity — the disposition to take initiative, anticipate challenges, act before problems compound — was one of the most powerful factors in their model. If you have built a career across global organisations, you almost certainly have this. The task is to direct it toward the right strategies in the New Zealand context, rather than doubling down on the job application process alone.

Pham et al. (2024) identified six forms of capital that international graduates draw on: human (qualifications and skills), social (networks), cultural (local norms), identity (professional self-concept), psychological (resilience), and agentic — the capacity to develop strategies that effectively mobilise the other five based on one’s background, expertise, and context. The most successful graduates were not those with the strongest qualifications. They were those who understood which capital to activate, and when. The career-changer migrant typically has all six. What they often lack is a clear map of how to deploy them in New Zealand.

Soltani and Donald (2024) add a further dimension: psychological capital and career agency — the growing sense, developed through active community participation, that one has the confidence and capacity to shape one’s own trajectory. For mid-career professionals who have been highly effective in their home context and find themselves suddenly uncertain, this is often the most fragile dimension, and the most important to rebuild. It is restored not through reflection alone, but through action — through showing up, contributing, and being seen.

Rebuilding agency is further supported by intentional support. Pham (2023) found that international graduates who developed stronger employability outcomes were those who engaged in active self-reflection about their cultural backgrounds and strengths — making their identity and psychological capital visible to themselves, and to employers. Career practitioners can create the conditions for that reflection: through structured programmes, mentoring, and coaching that help career-changer migrants name and deploy what they already have, while building the context-specific knowledge the local market requires.

For Aria, that meant being explicit about how to access the alumni mentoring programme and decoding the unwritten rules of networking in New Zealand. For example, attending a career expo was reframed: not as an opportunity to hand out CVs, but as a chance to practise talking to employers about genuine interest in their work and to build the kind of connections that convert, over time, into introductions. As career practitioners, we are building a bridge between the capabilities our students already have and the context they are learning to work within.

The career you want in New Zealand will not come from your CV alone. It will come from the community you build here. That is not a setback — it is an invitation.

For Advisors and Institutions: Five Principles for Supporting This Cohort

The career-changer migrant requires a distinct approach. Not more intensive support — different support. The following principles are drawn from the research and from practice.

1. Name the credential trap early, and name it with care.  Many in this cohort arrive with a well-developed but incomplete theory of how their qualifications will translate. Zikic and Klehe (2021) are explicit: migrants need to understand that credential-based entry does not guarantee success, and that their own agency is crucial. This conversation, done well, is one of the most valuable a career advisor can offer. Done too bluntly, it can undermine confidence at a vulnerable moment. The frame matters: this is not bad news about their qualifications — it is important information about how New Zealand works.

2. Move from exploration to structured planning — and do it early.  Career exploration alone does not predict employment quality. Career planning does. The first advisory conversation should begin to establish a specific target sector, a realistic entry point, a timeline, and a network-building strategy. Orientation is not enough for this cohort.

3. Reframe volunteering as community entry, not CV building.  In New Zealand, community engagement is a structural pathway to the social capital and cultural familiarity that employers screen for. Experienced professionals will take this seriously when it is framed as the deliberate, evidence-based strategy it is — not as a suggestion to fill gaps on a CV.

4. Be the bridge.  Soltani and Donald (2024) found that lecturers and institutional contacts play a critical role in providing access to professional networks that international students cannot yet independently reach. Mentoring programmes, alumni connections, and employer engagement are not optional extras for this cohort. They are the scaffolding. Actively connect career-changer migrants to these from the outset.

5. Set honest expectations about the transition.  The likely step down in seniority or salary in the first role is real and, in most cases, temporary. Han et al. (2022) note that overeducation experienced as permanent — rather than as a phase — is what damages life satisfaction. Helping students name this as a predictable transition, not a verdict on their worth, requires sensitive and careful reframing — and it is work only a trusted advisor can do.

It Takes a Community

Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to support the career-changer migrant in their journey. They have made one of the most significant decisions a person can make — to leave behind a country, a professional network, a social world built over decades, in pursuit of a better life for themselves and their family. More than a CV review, they need a community willing to receive them.

That community is made up of many people, each with a different role. Career advisors who unpack the hidden job market with care. Lecturers who open their networks. Volunteer coordinators who welcome newcomers without requiring existing connections. Employers who understand that cultural fit is something that can be learned, and that the capacity to build it is itself a skill. Alumni who remember what the transition felt like and make themselves available to those who are in the middle of it.

Soltani and Donald’s (2024) research found that what developed students’ employability and psychological wellbeing was not any single programme or intervention. It was the accumulation of boundary encounters — small moments of connection across difference, each one building the familiarity and belonging that eventually becomes, for want of a better word, home. Research cannot mandate those encounters into existence. People do. Institutions do. Communities do.

For the career-changer migrant: your experience matters. Your qualifications matter. And the community you build here will matter most of all. Start building it now — through a volunteer shift, a student club meeting, an alumni coffee, a conversation with a stranger who might become a colleague. The path to the career you came here for runs through people. It is not a detour. It is a map full of possibilities.

For everyone who works alongside them: the village is not a metaphor. It is the job.

References

Han, Y., Gulanowski, D., & Sears, G. J. (2022). International student graduates’ workforce integration: A systematic review. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 86, 163–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2021.11.003 

ISANA NZ. (n.d.). Encouraging international student engagement with the community. Student Experience Information. https://www.isana.nz/toolkit/student-experience-information/encouraging-international-student-engagement-with-the-community 

Pham, T. (2020, July 22). Social capital’s role in graduate employment success – Monash Lens. https://lens.monash.edu/social-capitals-key-role-in-lifting-graduate-employment-outcomes/ 

Pham, T. (2023). Strategies Undertaken by International Graduates to Negotiate Employability. In Rethinking Graduate Employability in Context (pp. 299–318). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20653-5_14 

Pham, T., Soltani, B., & Singh, J. K. N. (2024). Employability capitals as essential resources for employment obtainment and career sustainability of international graduates. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 48(4), 436–448. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2024.2344771 

Roskruge, M., & Poot, J. (2025). Evidence of the effects of ethnic diversity, years of residence, and location on migrant bridging, bonding, and linking, social capital: a New Zealand synthesis. Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science, 9(3), 831–867. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41685-025-00386-6 

Soltani, B., & Donald, W. E. (2024). A landscape of practice approach to enhance employability: insights from domestic and international postgraduates. Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning, 14(6), 1340–1353. https://doi.org/10.1108/heswbl-11-2023-0320 

Tran, L. T., Tan, G., Bui, H., & Rahimi, M. (2025). Evolving pathways: From the education-migration nexus to the education-work-migration nexus in Australia. Journal of Sociology, 61(2), 273–290. https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833241311240 

Udayanga, S. (2024). Challenges in navigating the education-migration pathways, and subjective well-being of highly educated immigrants: the case of Indian student immigrants in the United Kingdom. Frontiers in Sociology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1385664 

Zikic, J., & Klehe, U. (2021). Going against the grain: The role of skilled migrants’ self‐regulation in finding quality employment. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 42(8), 1023–1041. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2550

Arrival sign in Changi Airport, Singapore
Photo by Gilbert Ng on Unsplash

Careers / Cross-cultural / Professional Identity / Story

Navigating the Third Space: What International Professionals Need to Know About Working Across Borders

adminLeave a comment

Building a Career Between Worlds: Understanding Third Culture Identity and Cross-Border Professional Life

A few days ago, I shared on LinkedIn about my recent trip to Singapore. I reflected on becoming “more foreign than local” in my birthplace, and the uncomfortable reality of existing in what I call the “third space” of international professionals.

That post got me thinking more deeply about this experience. I wasn’t just downloading post-holiday emotions, but I was describing something that many international professionals experience but rarely articulate in everyday conversation.

This article is an exploration of that third space: what it means, why it matters, and why I believe these stories need to be shared more openly. And at the end, I’ll share how you can be part of creating that space for honest conversation.

What is the Third Space? Understanding Third Culture Identity for Global Professionals

The Third Space is a theory attributed to Homi K. Bhabha and defined in his book The Location of Culture (1994). A Third Space is an undefined middle ground where people actively negotiate cultural meanings, producing identities that are fluid and continually evolving.

Nodes and lines forming triangles superimposed on speech bubbles
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I’ve made several trips back home to Singapore since leaving the country to start life afresh in New Zealand more than 10 years ago. Each trip brought back different memories and emotions. This particular trip centred around spending time with family and attending to personal matters and family responsibilities. In short, it felt like a working holiday with strings attached. I don’t think I can truly behave or feel like a tourist in my home country, but at the same time, it was becoming less intuitive and comfortable than before.

One particular incident stood out as an example of negotiating cultural meanings in this third space.

A Real Example: Navigating Cultural Expectations as an International Professional

I was catching up with a friend near their workplace and they introduced me to their colleagues who were nearby. It started off as a friendly exchange of self-introductions and they were naturally curious about my life in New Zealand. In such conversations, I find myself pointing out what I enjoy about living and working in New Zealand, but also highlighting how I miss certain things in Singapore like the food, convenience and efficiency. Now that I talk about it, it feels like a natural script where you present a balanced view so as not to appear you’ve got the good life and they haven’t. Then came a response I didn’t expect, or perhaps should have expected: “But you’re coming back home to Singapore, right?”

I paused. Missed a beat. Then said:

“Well, for now New Zealand is home.” Followed by light laughter all around.

What I wanted to say, but didn’t think it good manners to elaborate with acquaintances, was this:

“Why is it so important for you that I return to Singapore? What does it matter to you if I did or didn’t? Would you like me less if I said ‘never in a million years’ or like me more if I said ‘for sure, can’t wait to return home for good’?”

And when I think back to what I said, it was a mix of truth and face-saving. It is true that at present, New Zealand is my home, where I live, work and have community. And it is true that I cannot say this will be the case in the future because it is unseen and more importantly, uncertain. But equally true is the fact that I needed a response to counter the proposition that I was surely going to return to my home country without the indignation of having the notion of loyalty and national pride rolled up in one fat presumption.

(Pardon my words—I’m a poet after all.)

In other words, I needed a credible response without making a big deal out of it and still entertain the notion that I could return, just not on their terms!

Funny how a couple of seconds of small talk exploded into a soul-searching exercise within me.

The Expectation to “Return Home”: A Common Challenge for Migrant Professionals

And when I think back to various conversations with close friends and relatives, there I found it again: an expectation that I will return and my response of possibility. To be clear, I often think about the possibility of returning ‘home’ and different scenarios leading to that. But it is the default position and expectation of my Singaporean friends and family that truly unnerves me.

Sunset backdrop with two silhouettes in foreground
Image by Arifur Rahman from Pixabay

In New Zealand, I rarely have conversations with others about ‘going back home’ because I’m not a visitor and have a very full and settled life in this country! But when I think back to the process of getting where I am today, and even in more recent memory, there were notable occasions where ‘going back home’ or being singled out as foreign was the response.

When I was doing my PhD and asking about career pathways: “Oh, you want to stay and work here?”

When I asked the secondhand shop owner where the violin was made: “Where you’re from.”

When asked by the motel owner where I was from and I said Wellington: “No, where are you really from?”

And on many of those occasions came my face-saving meek sounding laughter, somehow saying, ah ha, I know what you’re thinking and it’s not okay, but I don’t want to turn this into an awkward situation and cause myself any more discomfort.

Like the light laughter I dispensed when positioned as a patriotic daughter of my homeland.

A defense mechanism that perhaps perpetuates the presumption and attitudes, but also saves me from having to launch into a tirade that would be further misunderstood and mess up the social order of conversation (which by the way is a real thing according to Conversation Analysis, a theoretical framework I used to analyse chat messages between peers in my PhD).

Why the Third Space Matters for International Career Success

Because everyday conversation tends to be polite or follow convention.

Because it is risky to try to defend your own cultural status to a relative stranger.

Because matters of self-identity and the process of identity making are complex.

We need a space to work all of this out, and the Third Space holds room for discomfort and discovery.

The Third Space Comes Alive When:

  • You recognise that you are in a liminal zone of sociocultural realities
  • You participate in a tug of war of loyalties and self-disclosure
  • You translate between worlds about religious and cultural traditions
  • You struggle and try to make peace with incidents and emotions that linger on your consciousness
  • You want to work out who you really are and where you really belong behind the multiple identities, hybrid accent, and the undeniable color of your skin

It’s not a problem to solve. It’s a reality to understand and navigate.

The Hidden Challenges of Building an International Career

And here’s what I know from a decade of working with international professionals—expatriates, international students, migrant professionals: we rarely talk about this experience honestly. When is ever the right time or place to discuss the messy, complicated reality of living between worlds? That stays private, unspoken, often unacknowledged even to ourselves.

Woman placing finger over closed lips
Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

Common Experiences International Professionals Face (But Rarely Discuss):

  • The paralysis of imposter syndrome when your credentials aren’t immediately recognised
  • The exhaustion of code-switching between cultural communication styles
  • The grief of missing weddings, funerals, and the everyday moments of family life
  • The invisible labour of maintaining professional and personal networks across time zones
  • The courage it takes to keep rebuilding, again and again
  • The quiet moments of wondering: “Where is home? Who am I now?”

These are the experiences that live in the third space. The tensions that sit uncomfortably in your belly. The emotions you can’t quite explain to people who’ve only ever lived in one place. The complexity that doesn’t fit into simple narratives about “international careers.”

If you’re navigating a career and life across cultures, borders, and systems, you’re not imagining this complexity. Those emotions? They’re real. And they matter.

Why International Professionals Need to Share Their Stories

When I was planning my move from Singapore to New Zealand, I devoured every resource I could find about immigration processes, job search strategies, and credential recognition. What I couldn’t find were the stories I actually needed—the ones about navigating the third space:

The Questions That Really Matter for International Career Transitions:

  • How do you maintain your sense of professional identity when you’re starting over?
  • What does it feel like when you’re overqualified on paper but underemployed in practice?
  • How do you build a career when your network is 10,000 kilometers away?
  • When does it start feeling like home?
  • How do you reconcile the person you were “there” with the person you’re becoming “here”?

The practical information is important. But understanding the emotional and psychological journey—the reality of existing in the third space—that’s just as important, if not even more so, when we want to thrive, not merely survive as international professionals.

Yet these stories remain largely untold. We share them in quiet conversations with other international professionals, in late-night messages to friends who “get it.” But publicly? We stick to the polished narratives.

I believe we need to change that.

Not because everyone’s story needs to be public. But because those of us willing to share can create understanding, validation, and support for international professionals navigating this journey.

When we openly discuss the reality of the third space—the tensions, the growth, the complexity—we give others permission to acknowledge their own experiences. We create community where there was isolation. We transform individual struggles into collective wisdom.

That’s why I’m creating a space for these conversations: The International Career Journey Podcast, a podcast dedicated to the authentic experiences of professionals who’ve crossed borders to build their careers.

Introducing: The International Career Journey Podcast

A podcast for professionals navigating careers across borders—from anywhere, to anywhere.

I want to have honest, in-depth conversations with international professionals about their journeys. About the visa rejections, the cultural misunderstandings, the career setbacks, the identity questions, and yes, the eventual breakthroughs and growth. I hope to interview people in the next few months and launch the podcast in the second half of 2026.

Retro microphone on a table with festive bokeh lights. A vintage-style microphone placed on a wooden table with warm bokeh lights.
AI generated image from Pixabay

What Makes This International Career Podcast Different

This isn’t about celebrating “success stories” or promoting the myth that international careers are all adventure and opportunity. It’s about the full, honest journey:

  • Real challenges faced and how they were overcome (or not)
  • Cultural adaptation in workplace contexts
  • Career progression strategies across borders
  • The emotional and identity aspects of international work
  • Practical insights other professionals can actually use
  • The question we’re all navigating: what does “home” mean when you’ve lived in multiple places?

The Format: Intimate, Honest Conversations About Global Careers

Each episode is approximately 30 minutes—long enough for depth, short enough for your commute. The structure is conversational, not scripted. I’ll ask the questions I wish I had the answers to before I made my international career move:

  • What surprised you most about working in [country]?
  • Tell me about a moment when you felt completely out of your depth
  • How has your sense of identity evolved?
  • What do you wish you’d known before you moved?
  • When did it start feeling less foreign?

Looking for Season 1 Podcast Guests (Recording March-May 2026)

Here’s where I need your help.

If you’re a professional with an international career story, I want to hear from you. Your story doesn’t need to be dramatic or “successful” by conventional measures. It just needs to be real.

Who I’m Looking For: 7 Types of International Professional Stories

1) The New Arrival

You relocated to a new country for work and have been there 2+ years. You’ve navigated the visa process, job search, and cultural adaptation. You have fresh insights about building a career in a new country.

2) The Migrant Professional

You grew up or studied in one country and moved to another for work. You’re more or less settled in your new country and have 5+ years work experience. You’ve navigated the transition from familiar to foreign and can speak to the opportunities and challenges of ‘starting all over’.

3) The Serial Mover

You’ve worked in 3+ countries across different regions. You’ve built a truly global career spanning continents. You understand the art of professional reinvention across borders and have strategies for maintaining career momentum while moving.

4) The Returner

You left your home country to work overseas and have since returned. You can share insights on reverse culture shock, reintegration, and what it’s like to go “home” after years away.

5) The Cross-Border Remote Worker

You work remotely for international companies or clients. You’ve navigated the tax, legal, and practical challenges of working across borders while potentially living in multiple locations.

6) The Aspiring International Professional

You’re actively preparing to work in another country. You’re in the research, application, or planning phase. You can share your preparation journey and what you’re learning.

7) The Support Professional

You work in organisational or consultant roles supporting international career transitions. Examples: global mobility specialists, HR professionals managing relocations, immigration advisors. You have behind-the-scenes insights to share.

Why Share Your International Career Story?

The interview process is surprisingly valuable for reflection on your journey and growth. And your story could be exactly what someone needs to hear to make their next brave move—or to simply feel less alone in their current challenges. By sharing your personal insights, you’re contributing something valuable to a global community.

Or Do You Know Someone With a Great International Career Story?

Share this article with them. Tag someone who should be a guest. Help me find the voices that need to be heard.

What’s Involved: Podcast Details

  • 30-minute Zoom conversation (conversational, not formal)
  • No special equipment needed
  • Recording: March – May 2026
  • Season 1 Launch: Second half of 2026

How to Apply to Be a Podcast Guest

If you’re interested in being a guest, please complete this application form: https://forms.gle/jPX4srS6itf3BRn26

I’ll review all applications and respond within 5-7 business days.

Application Deadline: 28 February 2026

Stay Connected: Subscribe for Updates on International Career Insights

Want to stay updated?
Subscribe to my newsletter International Career Journey on LinkedIn or Substack. Subscribe for podcast updates, guest features, and reflections on international career journeys.

Or follow me on:

Have questions?
Leave or comment or send me a direct message. I’d love to hear from you.

Frequently Asked Questions About Being a Podcast Guest

Q: I’m not “successful enough” or “expert enough.” Can I still apply?

A: Yes! I’m looking for real, authentic stories—not just success stories. If you’re navigating an international career journey and have insights to share, you’re qualified. Some of the most valuable episodes will be from people still figuring things out.

Q: I have a strong accent or English isn’t my first language. Is that okay?

A: Absolutely. Your perspective is valuable regardless of accent. This podcast celebrates diversity. As long as you can communicate your experiences clearly, your voice deserves to be heard.

Q: What if I’m nervous about being recorded?

A: Totally normal! The conversation is relaxed and conversational—I’ll guide you through it. You can practice beforehand, and you’ll get to preview the episode before it’s published. Just think of the interview like a conversation with a friend.

Q: Can I talk about my business or services?

A: This podcast focuses on professional career journeys, not business promotion. You’re welcome to mention your current role and company in your introduction, but the conversation centers on your international career experiences and insights—not marketing services. Your LinkedIn profile and brief bio will be shared on the episode page.

Q: I have a unique situation that doesn’t fit the profiles exactly. Can I still apply?

A: Yes! The profiles are guidelines. If you have an international professional career story worth sharing, I want to hear it.

Q: What if my schedule changes and I need to reschedule?

A: Life happens! Just let me know as soon as possible and we’ll find another time that works.

Q: Will this be video or just audio?

A: Both. We’ll record a video via Zoom and the podcast will be shared on YouTube and audio-only podcast channels like Spotify.

About the Host: Dr Sherrie Lee

I am a career coach for international professionals. I’m born in Singapore, based in New Zealand, living in the Third Space. With over a decade of experience working with international professionals—expatriates, international students, and migrant professionals—I understand the unique challenges of building careers across borders because I’ve lived it myself. Through my career coaching work and this newsletter, International Career Journey, I help professionals navigate the third space and transform cross-cultural complexity into career strength.


Podcast (launching second half of 2026): The International Career Journey Podcast

Don`t copy text!