Blog 5: International Career Education
I realized I had a chance to convert my passion into a profession if I was bold enough to take the leap of faith and savvy enough to execute.
Note: To read “The Harvest” properly, please click hyperlinks like this which will take you to (1) 360-degree photos (2) 360-degree videos, or (3) informative articles that add valuable context. You can use your fingers to scroll through each photo to see the full 360-degree content.
In my final weeks on Wall Street, I shared my plans to quit my Six-Figure, Mega Fund Private Equity job to move to Communist Vietnam without a job with my friend and mentor, Stephen Breedon. As one might imagine, Stephen raised his eyebrow in shock like The Rock then responded, “History favors the bold.” What else could he really say?
Like any sane person, I have my moments of doubt. My decision to move to Communist Vietnam is far from risk-free. Thankfully, what differentiates me is my ability to persevere through difficult times to eventually find the light at the end of the tunnel. Growing up in a low-income household, I became quite accustomed to this way of living, a valuable trait for an entrepreneur.
Upon my arrival in Vietnam, my vision was clear—to become an entrepreneur. Beautiful as this aspiration might sound, finding a practical path to executing this vision as an immigrant is far from simple. I considered pursuing a corporate job and learning Vietnamese after work, but I wasn’t ready to pursue that direction. Instead of working a traditional job, I sought a time-efficient way to support myself. Limiting my time in the office would allow me to learn Vietnamese, pursue exciting business opportunities, and build the life I wanted.
About a month into my stay in Vietnam, I realized I had a chance to convert my passion into a profession if I was bold enough to take the leap of faith and savvy enough to execute. As an outsider, building a career in America is non-intuitive and grueling. These struggles, which I knew intimately well, inspired me to lift while I climbed. Building my career, I made it a priority to show the younger generation the ropes. Over time, I helped dozens of people build their careers in some of the world’s most prestigious and lucrative industries, such as investment banking, private equity, real estate, and consulting in America and Asia. Some of these students, many of whose parents never attended college, even went on to earn their MBAs from Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business. Not bad for a kid who grew up on food stamps.
In recent years, I learned of the Japanese philosophy, Ikigai, which roughly translates to ‘reason for being.’ In essence, Ikigai encourages us to build careers that (1) we love, (2) we’re good at, (3) pay us, (4) and align with what the world needs. The Ikigai framework helped me find a career that I believe fits my most authentic self—Career Education. At our company, International Career Education, we teach international students how to build careers in America that sponsor their visas and advance their lives.
https://internationalcareereducation.com/
We’re called an education company, but we’re not academic. Our mission is to teach students how to succeed in real life from a career perspective, which we believe influences 80% of our lives. It’s hard to win at life when we’re losing at work.
At International Career Education, our students learn directly from world-class practitioners who built their careers in America and Asia at companies like Oaktree, Boston Consulting Group, Google, Citi, and more. We tell our students the good, the bad, and the ugly of how and why we built our careers to help them leverage our inside tips and tricks and avoid our mistakes. We believe that the best teachers are in the real world doing what we aspire to do every day, and our job is to create the incentive and infrastructure for these teachers to share their wisdom with the younger generation.
In hindsight, the number one reason my friends and I struggled in our careers was not that the jobs were so complex, but rather that people simply didn’t care to show us the ropes. Additionally, too often people, disguised as allies, omitted the hard truths about cultures, organizations, and industries that would have made a world of difference.
Too often, international students come to America with high hopes, believing that studying in America is the cure to all of their life’s problems. This line of thinking couldn’t be further from the truth. Statistically, America hosts ~1 million international students per year who are forced to compete for 85,000 H-1B visas. This means that roughly 92% (85,000 H-1B Visas / 1,000,000 students) of these students are forced to leave the country every year upon graduation against their will. I witnessed this occurrence with almost all of my international student friends in college, and it was heartbreaking. Their forced removal becomes an even more sobering statistic when considering that these families invested hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in their child’s education, all with the dream that their child would eventually live and work in America after graduation.
Some might call our company innovative, but we see ourselves as rational. Our modern education system has excellent infrastructure for learning about Shakespeare and the SATs, yet it seldom teaches us how to succeed in real life. This is a real tragedy since we spend most of our time working. I believe this lack of Career Education infrastructure is why so many of us hate our jobs and are broadly unsatisfied with life.
There’s no shortage of tutors, consultants, teachers, or schools in academia, and it works very well. Our goal at International Career Education is to expand this educational infrastructure to teach high school and college students how to build careers that ultimately allow them to control their destinies. Our motto is “freedom through control.”
Looking back, on average, the most successful people in corporations were born into this success as insiders. Their family and friends worked in the industry, benefited from an enormous inheritance of relationships and resources, and leveraged these inherited advantages to compete against those of us who weren’t born into these fortunate situations, like myself and so many international students.
International Career Education is creating a third-party service to level the playing field. We’re making outsiders, like international students, insiders in a world otherwise set up for them to lose to well-connected, intelligent, hard-working locals.
If we hire consultants and tutors to help with college admissions and standardized testing, why would we not do the same for our careers, which are quite learnable? Our careers are magnitudes more lucrative, important, non-intuitive, challenging, and dangerous than college admissions, and we can tell you from experience that most of the lessons learned in our early careers are both painful and avoidable. We take great pride in helping students build careers that fit their life goals and are excited to scale up our efforts throughout Asia and America.
If you have any comments, questions, or inquiries, please email us at internationalcareereducation@gmail.com.
Location: Saigon, Vietnam
Date: February 6, 2024
