“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.
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.
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.
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.
