It is always a funny idea to me, that as a black man, especially one born in Somalia and to an impoverished family, that i get to speak about having privileges. But i do, and over time i think i’ve gotten to be much more aware as well as thankful for the ones i have.
Chief amongst them is the simple fact that i got extremely lucky that my father chose to move and have us relocate to Sweden. Having a Swedish passport and being able to speak Swedish have given me far more opportunities than i might have had in any other life where i didn’t.
That’s not to speak of this delicious dichotomy between the classic Swedish Jante’s Law and believing yourself to be in a more privileged position than others, but that’s a discussion for another day.
It has not been lost on me that many of the opportunities i’ve had over the years to simply relocate to another country at the drop of a hat has been due to the simple fact that my Swedish passport opens up close to 170+ countries and is considered one of the highest ranked passports to have in the world. I have on multiple occasions over the years simply booked trips to a country and arrived without ever having checked whether i would even be allowed into the country or for how long i can stay. If that’s not a privilege, i do not know what it is.
But more than that, it also opened up opportunities for me. From 2015 to 2022 i never spent more time than a year and a half in any one country (Portugal) and never held down a job longer than that. On average during this period of time i would stay in a job between 6-8 months.
Part of this was simply due to the type of role as well, which often were simple technical or customer support type roles. Turns out, there was very much a large demand of Swedish speakers across Europe and across many BPO/Vendor companies and i took very much advantage of this. Because of this i was able to switch between countries and jobs fairly easily and while the topic of staying in any role for long did come up a handful of times, many BPOs recognised the fact that i brought not just a much needed language skill but also experience. The fact that i was also very open and stated that i would take 6 to 12 month contracts did probably help.
The EU angle was also a massive boon of course, being able to easily and quickly cross borders, take up residence and not worry too much about taxes, etc. It was great!
There were of course also many downsides, from having very short-lived to non-existent social circles, having to sometimes find new accommodations, deal with house-mates in efforts to save money, trying (and often failing) to learn new languages, and never really having time to truly settle down and get comfortable somewhere.
At no point though during this period was it lost on me what a unique and privileged position i found myself in though. As a Swedish speaker, the salaries that i could ask and get were often very much higher than many locals and even other colleagues who simply just spoke different languages.
The typical BPO companies would have language-based bonuses or salaries depending on how in-demand your particular language was as well as the amount of overhead they had to have for particular clients that required native speakers. German and Hebrew speakers were the two most-desired roles and their salaries often reflected that, being even higher than my own in almost all cases. Then you had your typical Scandinavian language speakers of Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish. While the Swedes were often the largest group of those language-speakers, as Scandinavians we often tended to get paid around the same amount yet often quite high. As an example, back in 2015 in Portugal my net salary was around €1100 a month, when the average gross income in the country by then was around 800-900 a month. The fact that the cost of a room in a shared accommodation provided by the company was also included makes it just too much in a country that was still recovering from an economic downturn.
Because the landscape of the tech and customer support industries have dramatically changed since, specially more recently with AI in mind, i find myself having been once again incredibly lucky and privileged to have had these opportunities at the time that i did. I don’t think i’d be able to do something like that in the current landscape and major upheaval that we’re seeing across the tech industry.
But the fact remains that even in my current role, i am lucky enough that i can also live and work from pretty much anywhere in the world (bar a few exceptions) and it is far too easy to forget that’s not easy to come by or available for the vast majority of people.
It is not lost on me that simple decisions made outside of my control has given me opportunities i could only dream of as a kid facing a future in a country facing civil war and famine. It is opportunities though that i intend to fully take advantage of and use to the utmost, for you never know how long this will last.