Linkedin Blog

Imagine if you were transported to a foreign land, penniless, not knowing the native language, surrounded by foreigners who you’ve only seen in fatigues. With just one day’s warning, my mother packed up our meager belongings, my brothers and I who were 7, 3, and 2 years old at the time, and left behind her home and her third child. My parents struggled with the idea of leaving all they had, but they knew that the option of staying was not an option. My father who was a helicopter pilot for the South Vietnamese Air Force would be quarantined in a concentration camp if they had stayed.

Saigon fell to the Communists on April 30, 1975. On April 29, 1975, my father flew us out of Saigon while under fire from the Communists. Somehow, we made it in one piece to Thailand. From there, the Americans flew us to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas.

One of our cultural values at LinkedIn is Transformation: of Career, Company, and World. After a little over a year and a half here, I’ve truly experienced this for myself.

I started my LinkedIn journey as an Engineering Recruiting Coordinator where I was responsible for creating a flawless and unique interview process for candidates. A few months into the job, after it became apparent that I could take on more, my manager started asking me about my passions and aspirations and what I was interested in working on, intent on pairing my interests and skills with the needs of the business.

Transformation is one of LinkedIn’s key cultural values. This does not just refer to how we are creating economic opportunity for professionals worldwide, but also how we develop our own employees and help them become better professionals. LinkedIn’s Rotate[In] programme is a pilot initiative currently running in Dublin, Ireland that aims to do just that. Similar to The Great LinkedIn Job Swap, this programme involved some of our employees swapping roles, departments and desks to gain invaluable and in-depth experience of the organisations that are driving our business. A brainchild of the Dublin leadership team, this eight month rotation programme began in March this year and has already been a huge success, providing the three chosen pilot participants with a whirlwind experience of education and career development. They’re now six months in, and here are some highlights from each of them.

Editor’s Note: This summer, two LinkedIn employees came up with a wild idea – to swap jobs, homes, and cars for a month, bringing their families along for the ride. Rich Wong, Senior Director of Finance, is based in Mountain View, California and Sharon McCooey, International Finance Director, is based in Dublin, Ireland. Rather than dismissing the idea, our management team encouraged them to go for it. Below is a he-said, she-said account of their adventures.

Rich: I love working at LinkedIn and here’s why. Crazy ideas aren’t so crazy. People are encouraged to come up with new out-of-the-box ideas and managers tend to support these new ideas. A perfect example of this was when Sharon approached me about doing a job swap – including swapping cars and houses too! At one point, I was worried and joked with her about wanting to swap families too (like the TV show “Wife Swap”).