Opportunity and differences in Asia
While most of us have been enjoying long summer days and perhaps a slower pace to the working day, a group of hand-picked young New Zealanders have been settling into their internships at businesses across Asia.
Each year the Asia New Zealand Foundation sends about 18 interns to get three months’ work experience with some of Asia’s leading companies.
When we checked in with our current interns last week, they told us about some of their first, surprising lessons.
They told us about post-lunch naps in Vietnam, the challenges of communicating with colleagues in India who sometimes switch between English and Hindi midsentence, and the surprisingly flat working structure in Taiwan.
They’re learning vital skills for their futures – they’re building their ability to work in Asian cultures and business contexts. They’re skills that will not only benefit their own careers but New Zealand as a whole.
I vividly remember my own first tough lessons in Asia, and the experiences have served me well. It’s often through making mistakes that you learn the most about the culture you’re in, and in doing so learn about your own.
When I was in Korea to learn the language, I asked my teacher a lot of questions during class. I was a bit of a nerd and wanted to do my best, so I always had my hand in the air.
What I didn’t know was that in Confucian cultures asking a teacher a question is insulting to them – you’re signalling to them that they’re not giving you the information you need and they’re a poor teacher.
Another tip I learned the hard way was during the Cheongsong Apple Festival. I took a trip to a small village and was invited into someone’s home. They served me apples. As per New Zealand custom, I finished all the apples on the plate. They brought more. Not wanting to offend my hosts, I ate those apples too. On it went until I’d had so many apples I could have been sick. It eventually dawned on me I wasn’t expected to eat apples indefinitely and should leave some to show I was full.
What I took from these experiences is that you can never assume anything about another culture. Don’t assume that the way things are done in New Zealand are the way things are done outside of New Zealand.
This is especially important in business – because one of the first rules of business is to know your customer; know who you’re talking to.
Later in my career, during market access negotiations, it came in handy knowing Korean, because I could tell who the real decisionmakers were by the language used.
Many Asian languages are hierarchical – you use different words for people senior to you. This is one of the reasons exchanging business cards is so important, because a job title lets you know how to talk to someone. In New Zealand business meetings, we put the most important person at the front – but in Asia, they’re often at the back, and say little. In the negotiations the serious-looking official in front was often pretty junior, the person making the real decisions sat in the second row.
It’s small but significant learnings like these that set young people up to succeed in Asia.
That’s important, because Asia accounts for nearly two-thirds of global growth and most of our top 10 trading partners are in the region.
And yet more than half of the young people we surveyed last year for our careers research report told us they hadn’t received any Asiarelated careers advice. Close to half told us they thought more could be done to prepare young New Zealanders to engage with Asia.
This is one of the reasons we provide these opportunities for business interns. They go into the internships apprehensive and unsure – and come back confident and capable of engaging with a new culture and way of doing business. They come back understanding that Asia will be a defining feature of their careers.
People tend to think it’s too hard to engage with other cultures, because of language or custom or ‘‘foreignness’’ – but the interns come back understanding that with a little bit of willingness and know-how there are plenty of opportunities working in and with Asia.
An intern currently in Taiwan put it best: ‘‘My biggest surprise as an intern is the inclusiveness … This internship has opened doors that I never knew were possible for me.’’
At the Asia New Zealand Foundation, we see the internships as an investment in New Zealand’s economic future. Other countries are also making the investment in their youth as they see the growth of Asia, and as the old adage goes ‘if you are not moving forward you are moving backwards’.