I know I haven’t updated much about my adventure of moving to Sydney Australia as things began to fall into place. Things got progressively busy since starting a new job, moving into a new place, getting married in Hawaii, and adjusting to living in a new country across the world. It was a really big challenge and I’ve learned so much about myself along the way.

Previously, I was on a working holiday visa and given the work restrictions attached, it was really difficult to find a job. I applied to countless applications and went through tons of phone interviews for weeks, and started to doubt myself whether I’m cut out to be a designer in this city. Rejections were extremely hard to face and it impacted me emotionally as it started to chip away my confidence.

However, persistence was the key driver that led to my success of landing my first contract role at Woolworth’s digital team. What also led me to success was going outside my comfort zone and I started reaching out to strangers on social media. In addition to the traditional route of applying for roles through job boards, I joined Sydney Startups and Sydney Designers Facebook groups where I introduced myself as a UX/UI Designer looking for design opportunities. I reached out to any connection I could in my network and introduced myself to design recruiters on LinkedIn to let them know I’m looking for an opportunity. I’ve also went on meetup.com to find any meet ups that were related to technology, design, and startups since those were those were my areas of interest and attended a few of them.

Things started to fall into place and I was fortunate to have several job offers to choose from. I decided that working at Woolsworth was a great place to start since I had the opportunity to work with a team of digital designers. After a couple weeks of working there, I was offered a permanent role with sponsorship at Shippit as a Product Designer and it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.  It was a challenging role within the technology industry because I’d also be the first in-house designer joining the team and working to improve a software product used by companies such as Sephora, Uniqlo, and other large businesses across Australia. I’ve previously worked at agencies where I worked on a variety of web projects but this would be my first role that I could finally focus my efforts on designing for a single product application and the technical aspect intrigued me. Of course I said yes! And I’ve been at Shippit ever since. The team, leaders, and culture are amazing, and they really empower individuals to make decisions that are impactful. All the persistent hard work paid off when I landed this amazing opportunity.

Many people say I’m “lucky” I found a permanent role in my professional field because most foreigners like myself would find a temporary job and end up leaving Australia after the holiday visa ended. It makes me a bit angry that people think that its all just luck. It took persistence, dedication, risks, sweat, and tears to be where I am now. I had a goal of developing my design career in new country and I stuck through it. There were tough times where I could have easily given up but I didn’t. I didn’t want to take the easy way out by finding a job unrelated to design that would pay for bills and spend the year travelling/exploring Australia which I would’ve also loved to do. Setting my priorities straight and a clear goal in mind helped me achieve what I was looking for.

I normally don’t voice my struggles and failures because it makes me feel vulnerable. However I learned that with great success, there are ALWAYS many struggles and failures along the way. And it’s persistence that really helped me achieve my successes. The reason why I started writing again is because I want to share not only my success but failures along my journey, and that it is okay to fail. Failing is an opportunity to learn and re-evaluate the reasons why we failed. But most importantly, get back up and try again because you’ll be a little closer to success.

Thanks for following along 🙂