By Kirsten Sargent
Civil Engineer – Highways design at Jacobs Engineering; past SWE-RMS Secretary and Professional Development Co-Chair
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I have been in the engineering industry for four years.  Each year I have undergone a performance review with particular attention paid to SMART goals; specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.  One of my SMART goals, since the start of my career, has been to move abroad for work.  It was always at the bottom of my list as a 10+ year goal under the assumption that I needed a lot of experience before it would be attainable.  

Late 2015 I started asking why it had to be a long term goal.  Why not now?  I am not married.  I have no children.  I don’t own my apartment.  To move now would be easy compared to 10 or even 5 years when a change in one or more of those could make moving challenging and quite costly.  

I learned early on that it is the contacts you make which elevate your skills and thus have excelled at networking through professional society events, volunteer roles, and conferences/training courses.  Jacobs is 60K+ people across the globe, surely there had to be something through my internal contacts.  

I was naive when I started, thinking that it would be a quick move.  Nothing is ever quick.  After 6 months and almost giving up I was finally gaining ground!  I was introduced to an internal recruiter at Jacobs in the US who in returned introduced me to an internal recruiter in the UK.  

Since I was not tied to a specific city, just the idea of transferring, things started rolling.  

This whole process started 15 months ago and I have now been in Leeds for nearly 6 months.  The few months were scary as I had several hurdles to cross before feeling settled but now my daily struggle is just keeping straight what direction of travel am designing. 

If you can make your 10+ year career goal happen now, why not?  Go for it and then start on a new goal.  Life’s too short to wait.