Archives for Relocations

Ten years ago, Joy J. Bellefontaine was fresh out of university, looking for adventure and hoping to ease the burden of student loans.

Today, the 35-year-old Canadian is an IT project manager for DHL in Singapore.

Spending her entire professional career abroad, Joy has worked as an embalmer in Japan, earned an MBA in Germany and helped run an IT department in Prague for an international law firm. She exemplifies how someone with an adventurous spirit and enterprising nature can carve out their own long-term expatriate career. 

From Europe to Asia, the trick to traversing cultures, she says, is to be a good guest. “Even though I may live, work and pay taxes in a country, I am still a visitor and I need to respect the culture in which I live,” she says. “Finding the right balance of graceful strength of character and flexibility is an art for an expat. It is something I aspire to achieve.”

After graduating from Carleton University in Ottawa with a degree in political science in 1997, Joy quickly discovered that the available jobs in her field were not to her liking. She had helped cover her university expenses by working as an embalmer and through the connection of a Canadian friend, she landed a job as an expatriate embalmer in Japan.

“I thought it would probably beat an office job in Ottawa,” she recalled.

She was right. After a year in Japan, she moved to Prague, which was at the apex of what has been described as the “Left Bank of the 90s.” She took a job as a shift manager at expat hub, the Globe Bookstore. It was there that she met Martin, a Prague native who is now her husband.

She held a series of jobs, including another year as an embalmer in Japan and as a legal assistant for law firm Squire, Sanders & Dempsey.

As she helped manage a large database for the firm, she started looking for a way to get an advanced degree at a university in Europe. She found a school in southern Germany in which the government covered tuition for all students - even foreigners.

In 2002, she earned an MBA the Graduate School of Fachhochschule Esslingen. After returning to Prague, Joy went back to work for the firm, this time as its Trainer/Regional IT Deployments Manager for Europe and Asia. She spent much of her time on the road, training new law firm personnel in Milan, Moscow and Hong Kong. She was regularly tapped to give motivational training sessions.

Throughout, Joy continued to cultivate her language skills and, along with her native English, competently speaks Japanese, Czech, German and French.

That was no doubt a selling point when DHL hired her as a project manager last year in Prague. She was recently transferred to Singapore, which she described as a “bubble where people inside are completely mesmerized by daily life.”

“The quality of life is very high, the weather is great and the food is excellent,” she says of her newest home. “I could stay here for a few years, with a few jaunts to China and other countries in the area so I don’t get too soft in this shiny little bubble.”