“In Thailand, I worked for an international group of consulting engineering and management companies. I enjoyed my job and most of my family and friends are in Thailand and Australia. It was both hard and exciting to pursue my dream of living and working in the United States—hard because I had no connections in my industry and had to start building my network from scratch.
My wife found Upwardly Global online. Upwardly Global helped me regain my confidence that I could get a job without U.S. education or work experience. I was able to prepare and demonstrate my full potential to get hired as a Portfolio Manager at Water.org. The organization’s mission is to solve the global water crisis through innovative financing approaches. It’s meaningful to me that I am able to use my engineering experience and expertise in the Southeast Asian region to help people access the most critical resource there is: water.
I am most proud of developing our first-ever urban water utility program. Water.org provides technical assistance to utility partners to market, educate, and connect their services to underserved communities. My team and I incubated the program in Indonesia and expanded it to the Philippines and Cambodia, connecting over 150,000 people with access to utilities services. We hope to scale the program in many more countries. I was the recipient of an Innovator Award for pioneering this program.
I love that in my role and workplace I can ask questions and express my opinion—this is different from Asian culture where often people will not contribute their thoughts in order to avoid conflict. Upwardly Global helped me to understand that my global experience wasn’t a liability, and that I could make important contributions here in the U.S. and across the globe.
Recently, I achieved another dream of becoming a U.S. citizen. The future is very open and the sky is the limit now.”