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How Women Can Benefit from Working Abroad
With Advice from the Stacie Berdan and Perry Yeatman

by Brooke Eaton
Monster Staff Writer

At 29, Stacie Berdan was promoted from her junior-level job at Burson-Marsteller to senior vice president. What made this possible was relocating from Washington, DC, to Hong Kong. Of course, she had to acclimate to a new culture and environment, but when she returned home, Burson-Marsteller promoted her to global account managing director. In three years, she jumped up three levels and tripled her salary. She credits it to working overseas.

With the concept of the glass ceiling all too familiar for many women working in the US, working abroad can be a way to bypass elements of the conventional career ladder and help women become recognizable forces within organizations.

And Berdan is not the only woman to move her career ahead this way. Her coauthor of the book Get Ahead by Going Abroad: A Woman's Guide to Fast-track Career Success, Perry Yeatman, reaped similar benefits.

How Going Abroad Can Accelerate Your Career

“Early on in my career, I knew I wanted to have the opportunity to advance at a rate based on what I could deliver, not based on seniority,” Yeatman says. “I had no idea I could use going abroad to do that.”

After 10 years of working in Singapore, Moscow and London, Yeatman is now back in the US, working as the senior-vice president of international corporate affairs and global issues management at Kraft Foods.

Yeatman, one of the top 50 executives at Kraft, learned a lot from her first job abroad in Singapore. “I was meeting with heads of Asian businesses and learning how to work cross-culturally,” she says. “My corporate affairs skills became so much stronger in a short period of time.”

Berdan agrees, and cites three main factors that going global afforded her career growth.

• More Responsibility: “I worked in an office of 250 people in DC in a junior-level position,” Berdan says. “When I got to Hong Kong, I was one of the most high-ranking in an office of 90 people. All of a sudden I was in charge; there was no net under me and no one to double-check my decisions.”
• Direct Exposure to Senior Management: “I got to work with very senior people -- CEOs of companies and major players in the industry,” she says. “I had to prove myself and perform at a higher level.”
• Recognition: “If you work it right, say you turn an office around or you influence revenue growth, you can make your mark,” says Berdan. “You can get noticed by the president or the COO, so there’s someone rooting for you at the top.”
  

Use the ‘Feminine Style’ to Your Advantage

In the US, relationships among coworkers can often be critical and blunt. But when Yeatman arrived in Singapore, she realized she would have to work at a different pace. “Despite my aggressive personality, I would often take a softer approach when dealing with colleagues from different parts of the world,” she says.

From their research, Yeatman and Berdan found that the traits most often attributed to women, or 'soft skills,' like adaptability, flexibility, team leadership, patience and persistence are integral to business relationships abroad. “When Perry and I first started talking and then polled other women who worked abroad, this was a big ‘a-ha’ moment for us,” says Berdan. According to Berdan and Yeatman, the 'feminine' traits that have often been perceived as unproductive in the US are those that can be most effective in the international arena, therefore allowing women to achieve greater success for themselves and their employers in a shorter period of time.

Working abroad can present many obstacles, language being one of them. “If you are communicating through an interpreter, you must be crystal clear,” Berdan says. “You have to be patient and able to pick up on body language and other details, not just words.”

Yeatman adds: “I learned there will always be things you don’t know. Instead of going head-to-head with someone, I would take another route. By asking, ‘what if we did this?’ instead of stating what it was were going to do, I got positive responses.”

Returning Home

When Yeatman and Berdan brought their global experiences back to the US, they were able to reenter at a new level. Berdan attributes this to three skills she acquired abroad:

• Diplomacy: “I was a 29-year-old working in Asian markets,” Berdan says. “I had to be forceful and get to the point in order to be legitimatized. But I also had to be diplomatic.”
• Perspective: “I now have the instinct to picture how a solution could affect local, regional and global levels,” she says. “I can always put myself in my customer’s shoes, trying to understand where he’s coming from.”
• Leadership: “My management skills grew immensely when I was leading a team of culturally diverse people,” says Berdan. “I learned from the ground up, and fine-tuned my skills.”
  

Upon Yeatman’s return, she was hired as the vice president for corporate affairs for North America for Unilever. “I experienced totally different social value systems and economic structures,” Yeatman says. “I wanted to return to the US because I knew my international experience would add value to the American market. Having lived in all [markets: Americas, Asia and Europe], I can always bring a few scenarios to the table, saying for instance, ‘In Asia, this is how this course of action will play out vs. in Europe.’”

Berdan advises you start looking for a US-based job a year before you are ready to return home. “You don’t want to pigeon-hole yourself when you get back,” she says. “You can’t rely on your company to place you in the ideal job. Have an idea of what you want and advocate for it.”