My entire professional career has been about 15 years as a practicing lawyer. I’m a lawyer by training. I gained my law degree while studying law and attending business school at the same time. I joined APL Logistics in the US through a head hunter in October 2012 to work in the legal department. Not too long ago, HR asked me, “What do you want to do? Where do you see your growth with the company?” I replied, “I want to learn more about the commercial side of the company from a different point of view. If it helps with my growth and benefits the company, I’m even open to leaving the legal department.”

Fast forward to April 2019, and I was relocating with my wife and two-year-old daughter to begin my role as Senior Director of Strategy and Marketing at APL Logistics in Singapore. This exact role did not exist before but APL Logistics tailormade a position that filled a need at the company while playing to my strengths and emphasised the type of work I wanted to do.

The intent of this role is to assist various stakeholders by putting together business and strategy plans for the region. Then there’s also working with various product owners, managers, functional teams, and business development colleagues to put together branding and marketing collateral for our products or services.

This company has given me tremendous professional and personal opportunities. Personally, it’s an opportunity to bring my family over to the other side of the world with Asia as our backyard. My daughter’s exposed to three different languages at a preschool, and my wife has taken the opportunity to start learning Japanese.

Professionally, aside from the hands on training by immersion, there are also various levels of management training available here. Plus, if you want to learn things that are outside of your scope, there are many online learning and development courses available.

It’s opportunities like these, you just can’t put a price on that.