When I migrated to Australia in 1991, I first reached out to other immigrants I knew who had arrived in Australia earlier than me. Two former university friends were here, one working in a Chinese restaurant and another in a supermarket in Chatswood, Sydney. Their advice was to get a similar job and start earning some income, since I had limited savings.
This didn’t strike me as the path I wanted to follow, to I went to find a former acquaintance I had made when I was first working in Australia as a young diplomat. I asked this acquaintance how to get a foothold into Australian society as soon as possible.
He didn’t give me specific advice like – go back to study, get into IT etc. Instead, he gave me three pieces of advice:
- Don’t follow the crowd – walk your own path
- When you’re faced with a decision that you’re unsure of what to do or choose, listen to people with experience or results in that particular area. Don’t simply listen to those around you.
- Find a way to earn an annual salary of $100,000 as soon as possible; this was an income ‘bottleneck’ that was hard to achieve back in 1991.
With this advice in hand, I took a very different approach to establishing myself, my career or finding a job. What I discovered was the only way I could earn a higher level of income (without the traditional approach of further study for many years) would be in sales. So I took a job in insurance sales; a job which ultimately delivered the income goal, but also gave me great experience that set me up for the rest of my career.
