Silvia Puchovska (source: Zuzana Burdanova)
I graduated from my Slovak University more than 10 years ago
I have been living and working around the world since. My journey began in Spain where I started off working as a waitress, because I couldn’t speak the language. After I learned Spanish, I quickly upgraded to working for a local digital channel.
After 1 year in Spain, I moved to Denmark
AIESEC helped me to land an internship in that country. After its completion, I moved to Copenhagen. I fell in love with the city and with a man. I did everything I could to stay there. After sending out more than 200 resumes and only getting 2 callbacks, I landed a job as a marketing product manager for a major German multinational. After several years in the corporate world, I decided to take a career break.
Just like that I started my travelblog
While travelling South America, I realized that I would like to be self-employed. When I returned to Denmark, I decided to follow my dream and I left the corporate world behind for good. Throughout my travels, Slovakia was always my home base.
There is a huge potential to use my ideas from abroad in Slovakia
In Copenhagen, I saw so many good things, from services, to products to processes at work. But, I would often ask: “What can I contribute here?”. It was like they already had everything they needed, it didn’t need to be created, which is why I thought, perhaps I can bring these ideas home?
Most of my client base is in Slovakia, I help businesses with their marketing strategy
One of my long-term projects is ‘Street Food Park’, an event organized by Stara Trznica Bratislava. I am the marketing and PR manager. Together with my colleagues we managed to grow this event into a popular destination where locals, tourists and tasty street food meet.
I am a digital nomad, this is my lifestyle
For example, even though Slovakia is my home, I work half the year from abroad. I am an ambassador for remote work and I recently started a new online project, specifically talking about this topic in Slovak.
Even though I was writing in English, I quickly learned that most of my readers were in Slovakia
I realized that they had to consume my content in a different language, which was a disadvantage. That’s when I asked, “What would happen if I started writing in Slovak?”
My story was picked up by the Slovak media
These changes encouraged me to start creating work in my native language. Ever since, my support base has been only growing, which is how and why I give many presentations and workshops about my travels and work. After the events, young entrepreneurs approach me for help with their marketing.
It’s always a challenge to implement creative ideas from one culture to another
What you see in Berlin may not work here. I think it’s important to have new knowledge and information, but it’s equally important to recognize the local culture and what is happening here. I noticed some of the things I was introducing 4-years ago were too advanced back then, but Slovakia has since caught up.
The time is now
This testimony was originally published in Zuzana Palovic’s book, The Great Return. You can learn more about the book as well as Palovic’s own journey as a Slovak migrant that later returned to Slovakia at http://thegreatreturn.eu/.
