When Todd Brizendine lost his New York marketing job in November 2008, he immediately began shooting off resumes and calling on friends and former colleagues to try to land a new gig. At 40, he had solid experience as an online marketing exec, but no one was hiring. He started feeling fortunate even to receive a reply.
So Brizendine decided to follow the career path of a friend, who three years earlier had relocated to Vietnam to work as a sales director for a Vietnamese furniture manufacturer and was now talking up the opportunities in Southeast Asia. Brizendine concluded it was worth a shot. “I wasn’t going to stick around and suffer through the mess that someone else made,” he says. “I decided to skip the recession altogether. I was going to become a refugee.”
Brizendine moved to Ho Chi Minh City, tapped into the active expat community, and within a month landed a job as director of media intelligence with TNS Vietnam, the local branch of research firm TNS Global. His main role is to help clients track their online spending and improve their advertising efforts. His employer didn’t care about an MBA, which Brizendine doesn’t have. He says what execs there wanted was solid business experience in America, and in return, they happily helped him secure the required work permits.
While the country’s been battling high inflation, it never experienced the sort of financial crisis some economists had feared. In fact, the Asian Development Bank predicts Vietnam’s GDP will grow 6.5 percent in 2010, while Credit Suisse puts that figure as high as 8.5 percent. At the same time, lending rates are low and the stock market has been on the rise, spurring confidence among the expats and locals alike. “Opportunity is everywhere,” says Brizendine. “You just have to look.”
The telecom sector is expanding, and many firms are looking for managerial workers, according to a Research and Markets report. Intel, which next year expects to finish construction of a $1 billion semiconductor factory near Hanoi, plans to add 4,000 employees. And there is growing foreign investment interest in Vietnamese industries since the country became a member of the World Trade Organization in 2007, according to the Ministry of Planning and Investment.
All this has lifted demand for experienced foreigners because much of the population remains under qualified for upper-level roles, according to Mary Anne Thompson, founder and president of Going Global, a company that sells country-specific career and employment information to more than one million customers worldwide.
Wages are lower than comparable jobs in the U.S., but the cost of living is too. Brizendine, who’s making approximately 50 percent of what he made before getting let go in New York, says he’s living like a multimillionaire, enjoying five-star weekends at crystalline beaches, elephant trekking in Vietnam’s lush mountain locales, and exploring nearby Cambodia’s famed Angkor temples all on budget-traveler prices. He’s even stashing away savings for his eventual return.
He’s also found surprising advantages just being American. “I was once asked to meet with the CEO of a company who asked me if I would give a short presentation. When I explained to her that this was for a different department and I wasn’t familiar with the material, she replied, ‘I know, but you are quite handsome and Vietnamese respect Americans, so they won’t ask you any questions.’”
Ah. So here’s a question you don’t need to ask: Why is Todd Brizendine in no hurry to come home?
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