Bringing home the bacon

When Adam went off and got a wild hair about moving back to Europe, I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do. I love my kiddos and the thought of spending more time with them was really exciting. I do know myself well enough though to know that I really like working outside the home. I like getting dressed (though the last two years have been more yoga pants and a blouse for Teams Calls than a skirt with heels for the Board Room…); I like having adult conversations about complicated things; I like the sense of accomplishment that comes with completing a project.

Then we had to make some grown up decisions. Adam has talked extensively about our visa arrangement. We are super lucky to get to live in Liechtenstein for a number of reasons - the commute is better for him, the school options we have for both girls are easier, and the taxes are better than in Switzerland or Austria. The thing we gave up in the decision to go with the Liechtenstein visa is that I could only work in Liechtenstein. So that ruled out a lot of potential jobs for me.

I had started looking in January or early February when everything became official that we were moving, but between busy season at PwC and organizing a move and life in general, I hadn’t quite committed to the search. One evening Adam looked on the internal job posting boards for Hilti and found something I would be qualified for and would be a good transition role between public accounting and whatever my next step in the corporate world would be. He contacted HR through his network and they allowed me to apply (even though I’m an outsider!). I did a couple of video interviews and mentioned to the recruiter that we were coming over to do our house hunting trip in a few weeks. Things rather took off from there, by the time I got to Liechtenstein, I had an interview set up, a tour of the campus arranged and unbeknownst to me, they’d already written up a draft contract. We did a little negotiating on terms; the biggest being that they agreed to push back my start date to June 1st so that I had time to get the girls settled in before I started work.

So in our trip over for house hunting, I became the newest Hilti employee:

Fast forward to today. When for the first time in the history of there being 4 Powells, we all went somewhere for our day - Adam to his office, me to mine (coincidentally despite the fact we work for the same company in the same country; one the size of a postage stamp; we are on two different campuses about two miles apart), Charlotte to school in Switzerland, Olivia to daycare.

Hope Hilti is ready for this many Powells to deal with!