When I came to Hong Kong, I had a couple of major curiosities, among other things I wondered how the work environment going to be like as well as how I’m going to fare outside work (i.e. finding friends and in general people to hang out with) and how I’m going to adapt to the local climate.
Being five months into my rotation I’m happy to report that I find people to be very positive and respectful at work. Thing that one notices is that people are in general are a bit quieter and a lot of things get decided after the meetings, face to face, especially true with respect to a larger meetings.
“Face” is in general a very important concept in Asia. The last thing people want to do is to challenge their superior openly which could lead to the loss of face. So one finds majority of Asian people are rather quiet in meetings vs. North Americans who are used to the style of meetings in which if you didn’t speak, your ideas would not likely to be taken into the consideration. As the result, I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in a different environment and people might perceive me as being overly aggressive if I continue with the style that I was used to in Canada.
Hong Kong office composition is roughly 90% Asian and 10% European/North American. Naturally, one of my initial concerns was the fact that I don’t speak either Cantonese or Mandarin and I won’t be able to effectively communicate in the office. Thankfully, it turned out that even though the conversation language for majority of Hong Kongers is Cantonese, everybody in the office is fluent in English. The only problem that I occasionally run into is when I travel somewhere, majority of taxi cab drivers don’t speak a word of English, so you are stuck with either going to the major tourist destination spots and walking from there, or keeping handy a phone number of a person who can translate to Cantonese. The one other downside or upside, depending on how you look at it, is the fact that the office gossip is in Cantonese so it all sounds like gibberish.
Finding friends and people to hang out with didn’t turn out to be a challenge neither. Majority of expats are here are on a 2-3 year secondments so none have an established circle of friends and are quite open to meeting new people. I found the easiest was to meet people in the office or through common interests/activities. I quite enjoy hiking and dancing salsa, so I’ve met a group of people through both of those activities.
Hong Kong is great, like Vegas it’s the city that never sleeps. Any time of day you will find people on the streets of Central. Some bars have people partying till 8am the next morning and a lot of food places stay open through the night. Everything in the city is really close and convenient (i.e. 20 min is considered to be a long commute). The coldest it got so far has been +8C, and people were complaining how cold it was and wearing fur coats and parkas. I mean I can definitely get used to this, after the -30C winters in both Canada and Russia.
As with anything there is couple of negatives to offset some of the positives. The summers here are quite hot and humid, which I hear makes for a moist walk to the office. Pollution is bad and is due to the heavy industry across the border. And finally the city is way too crowded, which could simply mean that I’m not the only one who likes this city.
Cheers,
George
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Friday, August 7, 2009
Hello brave new world!
I moved to Hong Kong in mid-October ’08. It was quite a welcome move for a number of reasons not the least of them being the fact that October was the month that one had to start scrapping ice of the car in Canadian icy mornings. While Hong Kong welcomed me with the +31C degree weather and all of ice contained in the fridges where it truly belongs as far as I’m concerned, and not on your car.. brrr
Having visited Hong Kong for the first time in December ’07 as part of the MBA school trip, I was really looking forward to the chance to experience living in it. The impressions that I carried from the ’07 trip were the vibrant city which people defined by three simple words: work, eat and shop, and just shrugged their shoulders when I asked about another one that they’ve seemingly forgot to add to the list: sleep. As I know now, being here for three months, they weren’t that far off, after all.
My friends in Canada were shell shocked when they’ve heard that I’m moving to Hong Kong to start a job with Prudential UK. They were wondering if I was crazy and what made me accept the job half a way across the world. I’ve been warned multiple times that it’s not only going to be really different culturally wise, but everything else is going to be difficult as well. The question that kept on popping up was why I didn’t just get a job in Toronto instead. I think though, they were secretly jealous of my upcoming adventure.
One of my life passions is travel. But what I was dreaming of was actually a get a chance to experience a new culture on a deeper level than what you get on a two-three day tourist visit. So when Prudential offered me the opportunity in Hong Kong I jumped on it. Don’t get me wrong, it was an interesting opportunity to start with, but the location was a big bonus for me.
Now a little bit more about the actual opportunity. Through the interview process Prudential matched me to the Business Analyst role in the New Markets development group. We are part of the Prudential Corporation Asia regional office. My role focuses on providing analytical support for the Prudential’s expansion in Asia and beyond, helping to identify and execute expansion into new areas within our current markets as well as brand new markets. We are basically the team which is on the bleeding edge of Prudential UK.
It was October 9th Thursday when I touched down at my newly found HK home. It honestly didn’t feel real for the first little while. Part of it was probably due to the fact that the whole process happened so smoothly, for that I have to praise to our HR department, they helped to make it go off without a single glitch considering all the little details that needed to be taken care off before it could all happen. There were all the employment contracts that had to be UPSed back and forth between HK and Toronto, the HK employment visa that luckily took only two weeks to process, and then all the other nitty-gritty stuff that had to be taken care off before I could start.
I was to start the job on Friday, the day after my arrival. The 13 hour time difference and the 16 hour flight didn’t help, what did help was the fact I was full of excitement and quite busy right from the start. Well that and couple of double espressos that I might have accidentally grabbed from Starbucks ;)
Before starting at Pru, I have been familiarizing myself with insurance industry, the company and our product specifics. However the first couple of days were a deep dive for me, getting a full overview of our product set and our presence across the region. That was followed by the overview of framework for new country analysis and examples of the countries that we considered before.
I was a bit of an early starter at Momentum as our official start was supposed to happen in London on November 9th. We were to spend a week in UK building our understanding of the group, meeting with managers from various members of Prudential family and getting to know other participants in the Momentum program to help build us a support network in whatever we decide to tackle later on.
Till next time,
George
Having visited Hong Kong for the first time in December ’07 as part of the MBA school trip, I was really looking forward to the chance to experience living in it. The impressions that I carried from the ’07 trip were the vibrant city which people defined by three simple words: work, eat and shop, and just shrugged their shoulders when I asked about another one that they’ve seemingly forgot to add to the list: sleep. As I know now, being here for three months, they weren’t that far off, after all.
My friends in Canada were shell shocked when they’ve heard that I’m moving to Hong Kong to start a job with Prudential UK. They were wondering if I was crazy and what made me accept the job half a way across the world. I’ve been warned multiple times that it’s not only going to be really different culturally wise, but everything else is going to be difficult as well. The question that kept on popping up was why I didn’t just get a job in Toronto instead. I think though, they were secretly jealous of my upcoming adventure.
One of my life passions is travel. But what I was dreaming of was actually a get a chance to experience a new culture on a deeper level than what you get on a two-three day tourist visit. So when Prudential offered me the opportunity in Hong Kong I jumped on it. Don’t get me wrong, it was an interesting opportunity to start with, but the location was a big bonus for me.
Now a little bit more about the actual opportunity. Through the interview process Prudential matched me to the Business Analyst role in the New Markets development group. We are part of the Prudential Corporation Asia regional office. My role focuses on providing analytical support for the Prudential’s expansion in Asia and beyond, helping to identify and execute expansion into new areas within our current markets as well as brand new markets. We are basically the team which is on the bleeding edge of Prudential UK.
It was October 9th Thursday when I touched down at my newly found HK home. It honestly didn’t feel real for the first little while. Part of it was probably due to the fact that the whole process happened so smoothly, for that I have to praise to our HR department, they helped to make it go off without a single glitch considering all the little details that needed to be taken care off before it could all happen. There were all the employment contracts that had to be UPSed back and forth between HK and Toronto, the HK employment visa that luckily took only two weeks to process, and then all the other nitty-gritty stuff that had to be taken care off before I could start.
I was to start the job on Friday, the day after my arrival. The 13 hour time difference and the 16 hour flight didn’t help, what did help was the fact I was full of excitement and quite busy right from the start. Well that and couple of double espressos that I might have accidentally grabbed from Starbucks ;)
Before starting at Pru, I have been familiarizing myself with insurance industry, the company and our product specifics. However the first couple of days were a deep dive for me, getting a full overview of our product set and our presence across the region. That was followed by the overview of framework for new country analysis and examples of the countries that we considered before.
I was a bit of an early starter at Momentum as our official start was supposed to happen in London on November 9th. We were to spend a week in UK building our understanding of the group, meeting with managers from various members of Prudential family and getting to know other participants in the Momentum program to help build us a support network in whatever we decide to tackle later on.
Till next time,
George
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)