You may call me an Expat Wife…. I say I am up-skilling

After 11 years abroad we are returning to Denmark this summer. Back home, back to family and friends, back to my hood.

Back home, easy peasy.

Well, actually it will be yet another posting with all its challenges: de– and re–registering yourself and your family; making a new home; enrolling your child into nursery; learning and adapting to new cultural habits and norms (even for a relocation to the homeland, yes!); putting yourself out there for grasps, networking and socialising more than you want to, but you know you need to. And lastly updating, upgrading and uploading CVs.

Thankfully, a fellow expat friend, entrepreneur and Director of a successful organisation supporting internationals in the Netherlands, gave me some valuable insight: You need to put YOU out there. YOU have something that others in Denmark won’t have. YOU have the Expat Skills.

And I do! I master:

• Flexibility: The capability and willingness to modify and compromise status quos.
• Adaptability: The expertise in conducting crash courses on new countries and new cultures, as well as being successful with the implementation of its content, all while bringing out the best of you when in a new setting.
• Humbleness!
• Communication and Languages: Not only have my English skills lifted to a near native level, my understanding of different cultures, norms and non–verbal communication have been widely stretched.
• Creativity: The excellence in making the well–known happen in unknown settings.
• Emotional Intelligence: “The capability to recognise my own and other people’s emotions, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one’s goals.”
• Self–awareness and self–assurance: Your job is not your identity. Make YOU worthwhile.
• Project management: Every relocation has a start and a finish, I command the entire process.
• Being the glue that keeps it all together: Absolutely. Definitely!
  

I might have put my education and career on hold to follow my husband and his career opportunities, but I have developed even more skills that have been practised in administrative and communication roles along our journey than I probably would have gained following one study direction, one career path.

What can I reflect on?

Eight years later, the skills I described are as relevant as ever. I was ready to get off to a great start and have applied them in my current role as Executive Assistant to the CIO in a large Danish company – as well as being catalyst for the organisation, and ad hoc project manager. Actually every year during my evaluation and development conversations, I’m consistently told: “You are the glue that keeps it all together” – and I can trace this back to what I learnt, but more importantly, how I perceived the experiences I had, and learnt from.

So to all the Expat Wives, Trailing Spouses, Ladies of Leisure out there: You’re on the high road, seize your future.

Carina Hyllested
Danish
Accompanying Partner

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