new career direction for a Chinese immigrant

September 28, 2006 8:32 AM

Help with a new career direction for a Chinese immigrant to the US.

I want to help my friend get into a more profitable line of work. She moved to Southern California from Shanghai about 2 years ago.
In China she worked in advertising, computeing and industrial espionage, but here she works as a waitress in an Indian Casino for practically no money. Her English is fair, she has some schooling and all legal work permits, and she is motivated to advance into something more lucrative. But she has no contacts or guidance or real idea of what to do.
Any suggestions or clarifying questions will be appreciated.

posted by growabrain to work & money (6 comments total)

she should check if she can get some sort of security clearance. there is a whole job market for people just based on them having that and salaries are often double of what you'd get in the open market, if not more. having been in industrial espionage, computing and having desirable language skills could make her quite the star.

make sure she gets that nobody will give her anything here for free and that it's all based on how driven she is. I remember that being somewhat a strange of a realization when I came here...
posted by krautland at 8:57 AM on September 28, 2006

First thought: teaching Chinese for a high school. Maybe not lucrative, but probably well-paying for a single person and richly rewarding.

If by the Southland you're including West LA, various areas of the San Gabriel/San Fernando Valley and Orange County (what up, Irvine!), you have the one of the country's densest concentrations of affluent-to-insanely-wealthy public and private schools with already-multilingual student bodies who must take a foreign language in high school; it's required for admission to the University of California.

I think many schools would jump on anyone willing to be the first to help set up a program, and with your friend's history in such high-pressure fields as industrial espionage, I think she'd dig the altogether different challenges of both starting a new program which she naturally would excel at as a native speaker and working in an environment that quite possibly rewards innovation and individuality like many schools do these days.

"Credentials" might be an issue, or might not be - perhaps a private school would be more flexible?

Even if she's a native speaker of Shanghainese, would I be wrong in imagining that her Mandarin is probably perfectly good as well? Or at least good enough?

The People's Republic of China runs this website for the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language; this Taiwanese government website has details about a program it runs for people of any nationality. Here's an NPR story about teaching Mandarin in American schools.

And if the schools thing doesn't apply, I imagine that there exist private language schools and translating services which serve the huge business links between California and China.

This looks like one of those places.

Or she could start much smaller and set up her own tutoring service, which might be popular with parents looking to give their already-studying-Chinese kid an edge.
posted by mdonley at 9:15 AM on September 28, 2006

In China she worked in advertising, computeing and industrial espionage, but here she works as a waitress in an Indian Casino for practically no money.

If industrial espionage is one of her skills, and she told you that, I would suggest extreme caution in helping her find work. You don't want to be an accessory.
posted by b1tr0t at 9:58 AM on September 28, 2006

I think she should definitely research and get connected with an organization designed to help new immigrants settle into this country. They can help improve her english, assess her job skills and help her find better employment. Plus, there may be other immigrants there she may relate to. It will be hard for her to do it herself and not that much easier even if you helped her.
posted by pinksoftsoap at 10:07 AM on September 28, 2006

As a first step, she can certainly get out of waitressing and into something the next step up. Municipal job, bank teller, some other trust-bearing white-collar job, so that she's making a bit more money and isn't exhausted after work. Plus, wherever she applies next will see that she has had a responsible job and gotten a good reference in the US. Then she will be better positioned to figure out how to get the next step up.

Next step up would involve... looking at job listing websites for anything she feels qualified for; trying to connect with local Chinese community to see if there are internal networks she can take advantage of. Try to find out where jobs in her industry would be announced. Try to make some contacts in the industry she'd like to break into -- maybe by setting up an "informational interview" with a specific person at a specific company she's interested in, or by trying to find one-off contract work she can do to get a portfolio going and start making some contacts. Searching for a higher-end job is often all about who you know (since some of the jobs are never seriously advertised), and the only solution is to be active in making connections.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:35 AM on September 28, 2006

Industrial espionage, eh? There are lots of opportunities in the field for Chinese nationals, and no consequences if she gets caught. I'm surprised she hasn't already been recruited.
posted by evariste at 12:57 AM on September 29, 2006