Situated in a niche section of the internet, there is a growing Facebook group called Asian Wander Women. That’s my travel community! We kickstarted it back in the early pandemic days, as my cofounder Ivy and I embarked on our own travel journeys and we decided to start a community for Asian women like ourselves. We were in an interesting intersection of our lives, both having worked to a managerial level and looking for our next move. We wanted more flexibility, more meaning to our work, and interested in exploring because we had the savings and risk tolerance.
It’s been almost 3 years since that community was built and we do get questions around how to remote work and travel at the same time. I wanted to share my answer with anyone on the internet, hoping it can offer lots of value to someone interested and understanding how people can do it.
Someone in my travel community for Asian women asked the below question:
Here is my answer:
Good question. there’s so many paths!! A lot of people I know go down these couple of paths:
1) They work remotely for a tech company, usually a startup with more flexibility or a remote first company. Big tech is making their employees come back to office or doing mass layoffs. Startups are probably trying to conserve money so they don’t have a physical office or sometimes are hiring overseas talent. When looking for jobs or discussing the role, make sure you’ve defined if it’s remote or not. I once had an issue with a startup that promised me hybrid and wanted me to come in 5 days a week; I was honestly very upset and left after a couple of months. So definitely be upfront and share what you are looking for.
2) They niche down into their specialty and have their own services and offerings. For example, if you’re a corporate recruiter, you could offer your own 1:1 coaching services on how to find a job in tech, courses or group lessons. So many people do this at the moment, which is providing value to a consumer and then sharing it on social media to fill the lead funnel.
3) Become a freelancer – you get to work on your own hours, work on your own projects, but you have to pitch yourself constantly to new clients and manage taxes yourself which is annoying. A lot of folks use Fiverr and Upwork, but to be honest, I feel like the quality of freelancers there aren’t high quality and so you may lumped in with other freelancers that aren’t of high quality. That’s just the perception.
4) Work abroad or teach abroad – They move with their job. I did this when i went to Singapore and just traveled on the weekends. my second job eventually had more flexibility, so i would work remotely from time to time! This is probably the most nerve wracking as you’re uprooting your entire life, but also the most fluid (not easiest) process since you’re just moving abroad, get some help from your company, and then situating into a new country and community.
5) Just through their network, they are hired – a lot of these remote contract roles are sometimes done without a proper interview, just because they’ve worked with the hiring manager or founder previously. I actually got 3 gigs from just people I’ve worked with in the past and it was great to bypass all the interview processes.
Lastly, you mentioned you’re from Asia and remote companies are not hiring folks from APAC.
Why not try to reach out to startups and ask if they’re interested in overseas expansion to APAC? look for startups that went through Y Combinator, have Asian founders, and may expand between US and Asia.
All in all, there’s always some sort of sacrifice you’ll have to make, whether it’s later hours, taking a lower pay, networking your ass off to find a job in this market, etc. it’s not impossible, but it just takes some grunt work!
hope this helps. xx Emily